American Teacher Education Research Since The21^St Century

With the goal of seeking truth and reality, teacher education research should explore teacher education’s objective laws. If research results are untruthful, the real significance will lost. Although there is a great gap among each country’s teacher education research, American owns unmatchable absolute strength of other countries in this research area. Starting publication in1950, Journal of Teacher Education, hereinafter referred to as JTE, is a public academic journal published by American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), and it has occupied an important position in American teacher education research over more than the past60years.This study adopted content analysis of bibliometrics, used Bibexcel, a bibliometric software, to analyze keywords, authors, authors’province and references of JTE’s published literature from2000to2011, and explored American teacher education research’s emphasis and hotspot, high influential authors, research centers and high cited references. On the base of co-occurrence of keywords, authors, research centers and high cited references, the study used visual drawing software Pajek to draw mapping science and make American teacher education research emphasis, high influence, research centers and high cited reference visualized.Three research clusters around one core of research themes has been got after visualizing analysis. The first cluster was educational reform research, taking teacher knowledge and faith, teacher education theory, cooperation and action research as basis; the second was teacher professional development research, taking urban teacher education, mathematics education, teachers’learning and tutor as basis; and the third one consists of three branch clusters, i.e. teacher quality research, diverse research and teacher cultivation research.In short, teacher professional development research took the brightest and best place among teacher education research themes, educational reform research present a connecting link between the preceding and the following, mathematics education research raise a new research wave.Good connected themes co-occurrence mapping showed there was a close relationship among each research theme.As to authors group, although there was a great group that research teacher education, their cooperation degree was not high according to author co-occurrence mapping, large author team with close relationship has not been formed. On the contrary, high produced authors’institution had a comparatively concentrated distribution along American’s east and west coast and the Great Lakes, i.e.Lake Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie and Ontario.It can be seen the evidence of American teacher education research was rigorous through the analysis of JTE’s references from2000to2011.The published articles cited the classic literature, and the cited references present a diachronic co-occurrence state. From the high cited references co-occurrence mapping, the co-occurrence times was high and relation was close, which means co-occurrence references’research themes may exist correlation in conception, theory or method. Besides, great master’s articles had bright position, e.g. Cochran-Smith M and Darling-Hammond L’s works had a high citation and close relationship with other literature.