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Session Submission Summary

Highlighted Session: Building teacher’s content and pedagogical knowledge in early mathematics

Wed, February 22, 1:30 to 3:00pm EST (1:30 to 3:00pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Declaration Level (1B), Declaration B

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

The purpose of this panel is to present projects that have aimed to support teachers in developing their content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in primary mathematics in low-and middle-income contexts. Donors and governments are increasingly funding early math initiatives, aimed to provide students with a strong foundation in basic skills and problem-solving strategies that will set them up for future success in school and work. Given this, there is a need to better understand what teachers already know, where the gaps are, and how to fill these gaps.
Measurement of teacher mathematical knowledge is important to target teacher professional development (TPD) in math to the right level, as well as to measure success of this TPD. In order to identify the gaps in teacher knowledge, Lowenburg Ball and colleagues (2009) and others have developed multiple-choice surveys for measuring knowledge for teachers in upper primary grades (Cole 2012, Ng, 2012). However, there is a dearth of open-source tools that can be adapted across multiple contexts to measure teacher’s mathematical knowledge (comprising both content knowledge and knowledge of how to teach that content) and that point to gaps in their knowledge. In addition, there is a need for an observation tool that measures how this knowledge is manifested during instruction. Identifying these gaps is essential if we are to design teacher professional development and materials for math instruction that improve learning outcomes.

Presentations 1 and 2 in this panel will present two different tools that have been developed and piloted that aim to measure teacher’s MKT. Presentation 1 will present insights form a study in Sub-Saharan Africa that measured teachers’ mathematical knowledge. The presentation will focus on the development a tool for measuring MKT and highlight relationships between MKT and student outcomes. Presentation 2 will present data from the MKT tool used in two countries and discuss how the tool can be used for diagnosing teacher learning as well as building teacher knowledge. The presentation will describe the development of the tool, some exemplary results from these two countries, and then discuss the different ways these tools can be used.

Presentation 3 presents results from an MKT survey for preschool teachers in Kenya using the Mathematical Development Beliefs (MDBS) and the Knowledge of Mathematical Development (KMD) surveys. The presentation will describe the results of this survey in two groups of teachers and provide implications for future work with preschool math teachers.

Presentation 4 looks at how to build teachers’ MKT to increase the quality of instruction. This presentation will highlight results from a year-long numeracy pilot in Ghana, and the extent that it was successful in encouraging teachers to adopt new numeracy instructional practices by having them engage in authentic problem-solving activities and then deconstructing the activity to identify the instructional practices at play.

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Individual Presentations

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