The role of teacher professional knowledge for planning mathematics instruction

Preservice mathematics teachers’ pedagogical reasoning on hypothetical learning trajectories

Teachers’ professional competence is an important factor for instructional quality and for students’ learning gains. Teacher competence is hence an important research field and previously, teachers’ professional knowledge as key component was a major focus. However, the relationship between this knowledge and the ability to use it in and for instructional tasks is complex. Up to now the mechanisms how teachers’ knowledge such as content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) become effective for instruction are not well understood. In particular, for pre-service teachers who acquire CK and PCK at universities it is unclear how they integrate these knowledge components into teacher competence.

The planned project pursues the following goals:

Goal 1: Identification of how pre-service teachers’ CK and PCK become effective when working on the preparation and post-processing of mathematics instructional tasks.

For the preparation, we focus on the formulation of hypothetical learning trajectories of secondary school students, and for the post-processing we consider the analysis of secondary school students’ misconceptions. The results of goal 1 will be used as a basis for goal 2.

Goal 2: Development of a model to describe how CK, PCK, skills and abilities of pre-service mathematics teachers are integrated into teacher competence.

These two major research goals are accompanied by the minor goal of developing a research setting and instruments for analyzing pre-service mathematics teachers’ use of CK and PCK during preparation and post-processing of mathematics instructional tasks.

The project uses an empirical mixed-method study to examine how pre-service mathematics teachers master pre- and post-instructional tasks, e.g. planning instruction or evaluating hypothetical learning trajectories of secondary students. The study is conducted in Taiwan and Germany because mathematics teacher education in both countries shows well described similarities and differences. Moreover, differences in the educational system and cultural traditions provide contrasting contexts which allow achieving generalizable results.

Anika Dreher (Freiburg University of Education, Germany)

Aiso Heinze , Jessica Hoth, Anke Lindmeier (IPN Kiel, Germany)

Hui-Yu Hsu (National Tsing Hua University Hsinchu, Taiwan)

Ting-Ying Wang, Kai-Lin Yang (National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, Taiwan)

Funding

In 2016-2017 the project was supported by travel grants within the program “PPP Taiwan/Germany” of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).