Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education最新文献

This study investigates the effect of a professional development program designed to develop prospective mathematics teachers’ ability to notice students’ proportional reasoning. It examines how those teachers attended to student thinking, how they interpreted it, and how they decided to respond. Sixteen prospective teachers (PSTs) at a state university participated in a seven-week online professional development (PD) program. We provided participants with a research-based framework for proportional reasoning and engaged them in various ways via interviews with middle school students. They also wrote a reflection paper and received feedback. Combining multiple elements with interviewing was a unique feature of this program. The improvement in participants’ noticing skills was statistically significant. Specifically, in the post-assessment, the participants paid attention to most of the mathematical details of the students’ strategies, provided interpretations supported by conceptual underpinnings and evidence, and made research-based student-oriented decisions that focused on key issues. Implications for future teacher education practices and suggestions for further research are provided.

This study explored teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching mathematics (SETM) as related to their teaching profile and pedagogical practices. Using data from 327 New Zealand primary teachers, a multilevel structural equation model was constructed and analyzed that looked at the relationships among SETM and effective pedagogical practice scales and included characteristics related to the teachers and their schools. No significant gender, year level, or school socioeconomic differences were found with teachers’ SETM. Experienced teachers had significantly higher SETM scores than their inexperienced colleagues. Teachers who were self-efficacious in their mathematics teaching reported pedagogical practices known to be effective in the mathematics classroom in contrast to their low self-efficacy colleagues.

The importance of understanding what and how mathematics teachers notice is well documented, but more research is needed on content-specific noticing. In particular, knowing how teachers notice proportional reasoning, a vital topic spanning all grades of mathematics, could inform measures that support students’ proportional reasoning. We examined how teachers noticed when responding to two prompts (one student-focused and one teacher–student-interaction-focused) after watching a video of a middle grades proportional reasoning lesson. We analyzed the proportional reasoning reported from 13 elementary and 20 secondary prospective teachers and used cooccurrences along with noticing practices to describe how teachers noticed proportional reasoning and what aspects of proportional reasoning they noticed. Results indicate: (a) the two prompts resulted in differences in what and how participants noticed proportional reasoning, (b) participants were primarily descriptive and not interpretative when describing the proportional reasoning they noticed, and (c) the elementary and secondary prospective teachers both noticed similar aspects of proportional reasoning but showed differences in how the proportional reasoning cooccurred with the noticing practices. These findings reiterate the importance of the prompts used with teachers, the potential of using video to advance teachers’ noticing of proportional reasoning, and the methodological potential of using cooccurrences to examine teachers’ content-specific noticing.

This paper presents the results of a quantitative study investigating the development of teachers' attitudes and self-efficacy expectations for inclusive mathematics instruction in the context of an in-service training that was designed in a blended learning format and compared to an unsupported online offer. In the blended learning format, 101 teachers participated in an in-service training, designed as a combination of six workshops with concrete activities based on materials for inclusive mathematics teaching and intermittent practical phases with collaborative learning environments for children aged 6–12 years. The teachers' attitudes toward inclusive mathematics instruction and self-efficacy expectations are collected by using published scales (KIESEL) and scales under development. The effects of the blended learning program are analyzed by the t test for dependent samples or the nonparametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test and compared to the effects of an online offer without further guidance and support. On the one hand, the results indicate the importance of the blended learning program in comparison with the unsupported online offer. On the other hand, they show insights into the relevance of the participants' interaction with the materials during the concrete activities as well as of their try outs in and their reflection on teaching practice during the intermittent practical phases.

Providing high-quality mathematics instruction is vital for children because early mathematics skills are a strong predictor of later academic success. Unfortunately, not all early childhood preservice teachers (PSTs) have positive attitudes toward mathematics and, as a group, report one of the highest levels of mathematics anxiety (Bates, A. B., Latham, N. I., and Kim, J. A. (2013). Do I have to teach math? Early childhood preservice teachers' fears of teaching mathematics. Issues in the Undergraduate Mathematics Preparation of School Teachers, 5. www.k-12prep.mathematics.ttu.edu; Beilock, S. L., and Maloney, E. A. (2015). Math anxiety: A factor in math achievement not to be ignored. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2(1), 4–12. 10.1177/2372732215601438). Nonetheless, very few studies have looked at early childhood mathematics teachers as a group with specific knowledge, skills, and beliefs (Parks and Wager, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 36:124–141, 2015). This study investigated associations among teacher characteristics (e.g., age, educational level), mathematics anxiety, beliefs, pedagogy, and attitudes toward mathematics. Significant differences were found in teachers’ mathematics anxiety by PSTs’ age but not level of education. The level of education was able to predict PSTs reform-based beliefs and positive attitudes toward mathematics. In light of these findings, it is essential to support both positive attitudes and inquiry-based instructional methods in PSTs to encourage the development of teachers who are confident and competent in teaching mathematics (Lake & Kelly, Lake and Kelly, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 35:262–275, 2014).

This paper reports findings related to the pursuit of describing a lived knowing for teaching mathematics. Specifically, we used an enactivist perspective to describe the knowing exhibited by three experienced high school teachers in their instructional actions while leading whole-class instruction on the topic of the equations of exponential functions. From classroom observations, we constructed maps of the emergent mathematical worlds of ideas and collective mathematical activity. Three major categories of ideas emerged in all three teachers’ classrooms relating to the recursive multiplicative nature of exponential functions, the role of the independent variable, and the definition of exponential. Findings of this study suggest attending to teacher knowing for mathematical whole-class instruction must include describing the role of the mathematical activity in the emergence of the ascribed mathematical ideas. When teachers facilitated the collective mathematical activity as the means by which the mathematical ideas and justifications emerge, the mathematical worlds were diverse and complex, and connections among ideas were more robust in their comprehensibility.

The concept of statistical sense provides an understanding of the goals of statistics education and helps to clarify the design of activities that promote the development of statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking. The new approaches to statistics in schools mean special attention must be paid to teacher training. This training should enable them to develop their statistical sense while awakening their social awareness. Drawing on the idea of the cycle of learning from data, we developed an activity based on data extracted from EUROSTAT, with the goal being to find out how the social issues underlying the data might play a role in the development of a socially critical stance among prospective teachers. We also wanted to find out how the complexity of the data presented might interfere with a satisfactory resolution of the cycle of learning from data. In general, we observed that when the data were socially relevant and closely related to their interests, the activity generated opportunities for the development of their social awareness. However, the development of the cycle may have been constrained by the difficulties they encountered when handling data with characteristics typical of civic statistics. We conclude that not all the contexts that accompany the cycle of learning from data promote social awareness in the same way and that the data representations associated with the cycle must be aligned with the prospective teachers’ prior statistical knowledge.

The scalability and accessibility of quality professional development (PD) is an ongoing concern in the teacher education community, yet little research has been conducted on potential solutions. We aimed to address this gap by developing an interactive, virtual PD program that uses intelligent tutoring systems and provides instant feedback to teachers. We then explored the role of this program in developing teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge of mathematics. We collected data from 60 teachers located across the USA and found that those who completed the program increased their content and pedagogical content knowledge.

Prior research has revealed a variety of factors associated with teacher views around when to incorporate challenging mathematical tasks into instruction, such as teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and their prior assumptions about student ability. There has been less focus on how motivational beliefs (teacher anxiety, enjoyment, confidence) shape teachers’ views around teaching with challenging tasks. To address this gap, the current study administered questionnaires to Australian primary school teachers (n = 92) prior to them undertaking a professional learning programme focusing on teaching mathematics through sequences of challenging tasks. Employing logistic regression, we found that more teaching experience and lower levels of teacher anxiety teaching mathematics were associated with the view that challenging tasks should be introduced earlier in a student’s schooling. We also found that higher levels of teacher enjoyment substantially increased the likelihood that a teacher would endorse teaching with challenging tasks more than once a week; however, higher levels of teaching confidence somewhat reduced the likelihood. Implications for practice are discussed.

Recent scholarship has explored mathematical demands faced by mathematics teacher educators and ways to support their development, but little attention has been given to the basic question of how mathematics teacher educators think about content knowledge for teaching. Knowing what they think could inform efforts to support them. Our analysis reveals that some think about mathematical knowledge for teaching as an independent, abstracted resource to be taught and learned in relative isolation from teaching, while others think about it as dynamic, situated work. We argue that this key difference matters for how they work with teachers. Further, our analysis reveals that their thinking about both teaching and justice interacts with their thinking about mathematical knowledge for teaching and that their thinking in these other two domains can be a resource for supporting their mathematical development.