How Education Affects Mathematics Teachers' Knowledge: Unpacking Selected Aspects of Teacher Knowledge

Abstract

It is no surprise that all mathematics teacher education programs attempt to increase future teachers' knowledge, since teachers' knowledge has an effect not only on their teaching but also on their students' achievements. However, measuring the relationship between teachers' knowledge and their education is overly demanding. In this study we unpacked a selection of aspects of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) and created a 72-item survey that would measure teacher educators' and graduated teachers' perceptions of what graduated teachers have learned well or less well during teacher education. The data were collected under the auspices of the University of Eastern Finland. The results show that the teacher educators (N=18) and graduated teachers (N=101) who participated have developed rather similar perceptions of what graduated mathematics teachers learn well or poorly during their teacher education. According to the results, Subject matter knowledge and Pedagogical content knowledge receive similar emphases in the teacher education program, but certain fields of teacher knowledge, such as Common content knowledge, receive a greater emphasis than others. The approach described here provides a simple way of investigating this demanding phenomenon, and hence the limitations and the possibilities of the study will be discussed in detail.

Finnish graduated physics teachers’ views about their teacher education program – The disparity between the needs and delivery

“…This suggests that the greatest deficiencies in this physics teacher education program lie on pedagogical content knowledge with its various sub-domains. This finding is well in agreement with the findings from mathematics teacher education program evaluation study (Koponen et al, 2016(Koponen et al, , 2017.…”

“…However, there are also studies concerning subject-specific teacher knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge for different disciplines (e.g. Koponen, Asikainen, Viholainen & Hirvonen, 2017;Keller, Neumann & Fischer, 2017;van Driel, Verloop & de Vos, 1998). Typically, these studies are constructed based on Shulman's framework or are otherwise well in agreement with it.…”

“…These findings suggest in their teacher education there are problems in the domains of common content knowledge, horizon content knowledge, and knowledge of content and students. Koponen et al (2016Koponen et al ( , 2017) have used MKT model for evaluating graduated mathematics teachers' views (often physics minors) about the teacher education they have received. It was revealed that especially the domains of Common content knowledge, Special content knowledge, Knowledge of content and students, and Knowledge of content and teaching would deserve more emphasis in teacher education according to graduated teachers which suggests that these domains have also a great importance for teachers' profession, even if this was not probed explicitly.…”

Forty Years of Mathematics Education: 1980-2019

“…The mathematics education studies in WoS database were first published at early 1980s and despite the change in the rate of growth, the number of publications continued to increase in each period. According to keyword analysis, there were a great variety of studies in mathematics education to determine standards and principles of teaching and learning mathematics such as reform movements (Gravemeijer et al, 2016;Lundin, 2012;Sengupta-Irving, Redman, & Enyedy, 2013), curriculum (Fonger et al, 2018;Fouze & Amit, 2017;Pepin et al, 2017;Voigt, Fredriksen, & Rasmussen, 2020), educational policy (Dalby & Noyes, 2018;Lin, Wang, & Chang, 2018;Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018), equity (Jurdak, 2011(Jurdak, , 2014Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018;Tan & Thorius, 2019), assessment (Beumann & Wegner, 2018;Kim & Cho, 2015;Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018;Veldhuis & van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 2014;Veldhuis et al, 2013), to evaluate the cognitive and affective skills such as problem solving (Boonen et al, 2016;Verschaffel et al, 2020), achievement (Ciftci, 2015;Veldhuis & van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 2020), motivation (Schukajlow, Rakoczy, & Pekrun, 2017), to learn more about and support mathematics teachers such as professional development (Sztajn et al, 2007;Williams & Ryan, 2020), teacher education (Buchholtz, 2017;Healy & Ferreira dos Santos, 2014;Tatto & Senk, 2011), teacher knowledge (Koponen et al, 2017;Olfos & Rodríguez, 2019;Scheiner et al, 2019), teacher beliefs…”

A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Competences (MTPC) in a Mongolian Context

“…In other word, the learning environment of teacher practice is highly dependent on the teacher's experience. Koponen et al (2017) divides teacher knowledge into six components, three of which are mathematical (subject matter). Based on their results, Common content knowledge is clearly the most strongly emphasized component of Subject matter knowledge in the studied teacher education program.…”