Hispanic Preservice Teachers’ Peer Evaluations of Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development

Abstract

This study investigated preservice teachers from two teacher education programs, elementary generalists and bilingual generalists (who will teach all subjects in both English and Spanish), about their instructional design abilities via examination of their ability to integrate interdisciplinary-themed activities into mathematics lessons. The findings illustrate the value provided by differentiating teacher preparation for preservice bilingual teachers-especially for challenging STEM-related (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects such as mathematics-based on their distinctive pedagogical, cognitive, and linguistic requirements.Differences in cognitive capacities and academic achievements between bilingual and monolingual students had been investigated by a number of researchers throughout the past three decades, and findings consistently found that bilingual students-especially