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Abstract

The assessment of student dispositions is an important part of teacher preparation programs in the United States. To explore the beliefs and perceptions of in-service educators and teacher education students, we used a researcher-designed survey to examine responses of three groups: a) in-service music educators, b) collegiate music education majors, and c) collegiate education majors (not music) in a Midwestern state in the United States. The survey included questions that asked participants to describe dispositions, rank and rate the importance of the dispositional traits, and to rank their opinion on the importance of dispositions in comparison to content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Members of each group indicated they did not know the term ‘disposition’ and could not define it. Ratings of dispositions by the three groups in this study all showed a high perceived importance of two dispositional traits: ‘respectful’ and ‘reliable.’ The in-service music educators and collegiate music education majors ranked professional dispositions as most important while non-music collegiate education majors ranked pedagogical knowledge as the most important. Results from this study are not generalizable due to the homogeneous sample.

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