The variety of teacher preparation programs in the United States provides an opportunity to develop better ways of preparing teachers. There are three key areas in which teacher preparation must improve, including the content teachers will teach, the curriculum of practice essential for beginning teaching, and the approaches and settings best…

Mathematics teachers need specialized math knowledge that is different from the knowledge needed by mathematicians, including the mathematical understanding involved in posing questions, interpreting students' answers, providing explanations, and using representations. Based on the authors' work involving over 300 teachers, they have found that…

This article describes and analyzes a program of work in elementary mathematics teacher education at the University of Michigan that has, for a decade, been a site for the development of approaches to preparing beginning K-8 mathematics teachers that are both aimed at practice and centered in content. Among the products of this work are video…

This article describes a study in which measures of mathematical knowledge for teaching developed in the United States were adapted to measure mathematical knowledge for teaching in Ireland. When adapting the measures it was not assumed that the mathematical knowledge used by Irish and U.S. teachers is the same. Instead psychometric and…

This study illuminates claims that teachers' mathematical knowledge plays an important role in their teaching of this subject matter. In particular, we focus on teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT), which includes both the mathematical knowledge that is common to individuals working in diverse professions and the mathematical…

In this article we discuss efforts to design and empirically test measures of teachers' content knowledge for teaching elementary mathematics. We begin by reviewing the literature on teacher knowledge, noting how scholars have organized such knowledge. Next we describe survey items we wrote to represent knowledge for teaching mathematics and…

Proposes three problems that must be solved in order to best prepare teachers who both know content and can make use of it to help all students learn, including: identifying the content knowledge that matters for teaching; understanding how such knowledge needs to be held; and determining what it takes to learn to use such knowledge in practice.…

Recent emphasis on raising standards has attracted Americans' attention to factors that improve student learning. An examination of the relationship between teacher knowledge and student performance is offered in this report. The text summarizes what research suggests about various kinds of teacher education, the professional development teachers…

This paper examines what teacher educators, policymakers, and teachers think they know about the current mathematics reforms and what it takes to help teachers engage with these reforms. The analysis is organized around three issues: (1) the "it" envisioned by the reforms; (2) what teachers (and others) bring to learning "it"; (3) what is known…

This study explored whether and how teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching contributes to gains in students' mathematics achievement. The authors used a linear mixed-model methodology in which first and third graders' mathematical achievement gains over a year were nested within teachers, who in turn were nested within schools. They found…

Widespread agreement exists that U.S. teachers need improved mathematics knowledge for teaching. Over the past decade, policymakers have funded a range of professional development efforts designed to address this need. However, there has been little success in determining whether and when teachers develop mathematical knowledge from professional…

This study was conducted to examine teachers' knowledge of teaching mathematics and writing to diverse learners, and knowledge changes that occur over time, particularly during and after formal teacher education programs. Commonplaces of teaching were articulated as subject matter, learners, learning, and context. Three measurement instruments…

Describes curricular standards that concern teachers and teacher educators. Argues that reforms are based on changing images of good teaching, aimed at undetermined and uncertain aspects of teaching, and that little theory exists concerning how new teachers learn to teach. Proposes several areas of investigation as teacher education programs are…