Subject Guide for Elementary Education Majors
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This subject guide was created for the express use of University of Arizona undergraduates majoring in Elementary Education. To suit these students, early in the creation of this Guide, the requirements for Elementary Education undergraduate majors were consulted. It was determined that the Elementary Education major at the University of Arizona is offered through the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies, and is administered to undergraduate students in their third and fourth years of college. According to the University of Arizona College of Education website, one semester of on-campus Foundation courses is required of students in Elementary Education program, followed by two semesters of courses taught at a local elementary school, and then a final semester of student teaching.
The University of Arizona Libraries offer a Subject Guide in Education, but the scope of this Education Guide required a narrowing of that focus to Elementary Education, as well as modifications that would ease the navigation process for undergraduate students who would likely be unfamiliar with article databases. Furthermore, these students' concentrations would not be sufficiently declared to require many of the specialized resources included in most Subject Guides in Education. It was therefore determined that larger collections students would eventually have to navigate be included, while smaller, more concentration-specific collections would be omitted.
The included indexes were described in the format considered most appropriate for undergraduates who have just chosen their majors: Bullet points and brief descriptions including links for easy scanning and immediate navigation. Within many of the larger databases and collections, indexes of articles by subject were consulted and then augmented with linking key search terms to narrow the focus to the Elementary level.
While the University of Arizona Academic Advisement Report (2011) reflects requirements for classes in language, communicative arts, diversity, science and health instruction, these courses are all taken in the semesters after these students have declared the Elementary Education Major, and this Subject Guide does not reflect them specifically. The decision to omit them from the focus of this Subject Guide was based on the need for brevity and simplicity. Students newly declaring majors, in this case undergraduates late in their second or early in their third year of college, are likely to be in early stages of Iiteracy in scholarly information. This guide was therefore designed as an introduction to scholarship, laid out simply and attractively, to be returned to throughout the students' first semester following their major declaration, and perhaps beyond.
Finally, the decision to include Online Resources in this guide was based on a number of factors. First, while scholarship provides a crucial foundation to the studies of Elementary Education students, is it likely they will spend far more time seeing what is available on the internet and noting what professional teachers do in practice than they will reading about academic theories of teaching. This guide is designed to help these students in their studies, and therefore provides links to reliable resources popular among professional teachers in their field. Secondly, the inclusion of links to online resources may compel the student who visit this guide once to return more often than if it were to omit these resources.
This subject guide was created for the express use of University of Arizona undergraduates majoring in Elementary Education. To suit these students, early in the creation of this Guide, the requirements for Elementary Education undergraduate majors were consulted. It was determined that the Elementary Education major at the University of Arizona is offered through the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies, and is administered to undergraduate students in their third and fourth years of college. According to the University of Arizona College of Education website, one semester of on-campus Foundation courses is required of students in Elementary Education program, followed by two semesters of courses taught at a local elementary school, and then a final semester of student teaching.
The University of Arizona Libraries offer a Subject Guide in Education, but the scope of this Education Guide required a narrowing of that focus to Elementary Education, as well as modifications that would ease the navigation process for undergraduate students who would likely be unfamiliar with article databases. Furthermore, these students' concentrations would not be sufficiently declared to require many of the specialized resources included in most Subject Guides in Education. It was therefore determined that larger collections students would eventually have to navigate be included, while smaller, more concentration-specific collections would be omitted.
The included indexes were described in the format considered most appropriate for undergraduates who have just chosen their majors: Bullet points and brief descriptions including links for easy scanning and immediate navigation. Within many of the larger databases and collections, indexes of articles by subject were consulted and then augmented with linking key search terms to narrow the focus to the Elementary level.
While the University of Arizona Academic Advisement Report (2011) reflects requirements for classes in language, communicative arts, diversity, science and health instruction, these courses are all taken in the semesters after these students have declared the Elementary Education Major, and this Subject Guide does not reflect them specifically. The decision to omit them from the focus of this Subject Guide was based on the need for brevity and simplicity. Students newly declaring majors, in this case undergraduates late in their second or early in their third year of college, are likely to be in early stages of Iiteracy in scholarly information. This guide was therefore designed as an introduction to scholarship, laid out simply and attractively, to be returned to throughout the students' first semester following their major declaration, and perhaps beyond.
Finally, the decision to include Online Resources in this guide was based on a number of factors. First, while scholarship provides a crucial foundation to the studies of Elementary Education students, is it likely they will spend far more time seeing what is available on the internet and noting what professional teachers do in practice than they will reading about academic theories of teaching. This guide is designed to help these students in their studies, and therefore provides links to reliable resources popular among professional teachers in their field. Secondly, the inclusion of links to online resources may compel the student who visit this guide once to return more often than if it were to omit these resources.