The increase in online education has implications for mathematics teacher educators who are tasked with teaching mathematics content and pedagogy to pre-service teachers (PSTs) who do not attend on-campus. Concerns about PSTs' content knowledge continues to be an ongoing issue, and ways to address this, especially in an online environment, require…

Reform movements in mathematics education advocate that mathematical argumentation play a central role in all classrooms. However, research shows that mathematics teachers at all grade level find it challenging to support argumentation in mathematics classrooms. This study examines the role of teachers' mathematical knowledge in teachers' support…

This research aims to understand how prospective teachers develop their knowledge about whole-class discussions during a lesson study. Following a qualitative approach, we focus on the work of three prospective mathematics teachers preparing, leading, and reflecting on wholeclass discussions. Data was collected through participant observation with…

Since the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics ([NCTM], 2000) and the National Research Council ([NRC], 2005) revealed that problem posing needed to be incorporated into mathematics classrooms, the importance of teachers' roles in problem posing has been emphasized in K-12 mathematics curriculum because of instructors' impact on students'…

Teacher Education Programs (TEPs) are intended to prepare students to become qualified professionals in the field of education. Yet, many preservice teachers (PSTs) have difficulty recognizing their new roles, not simply as students in the TEP, but as future educators. As PSTs progress through their coursework, field experiences, and student…

Concerns have been expressed about the quality of teaching and learning in Grade R (reception) classrooms in South Africa. In mathematics, learning outcomes are said to be particularly limited, especially in poorer provinces of the country (Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation [DPME] 2012). The study reported in this article…

It is not uncommon in many Australian primary schools for a teaching staff member to undertake the leadership or coordination of mathematics in his or her school. Some research (e.g., Cheeseman & Clarke, 2005) suggests that coordinators and leaders play an important role in the leadership and management of mathematics teaching and learning in…

Chinese pre-school children perform well in learning mathematics compared with English-speaking children. This study investigates the scenes behind Chinese preschool children's mathematics performance using teacher questionnaires and interviews. Results indicated that the Chinese number system appeared to afford advantages to Chinese children in…

Ambitious teaching is a form of teaching that requires a high level of teacher responsiveness to what students do as they actively engage with the subject matter. Thus, a teacher enacting ambitious teaching is often confronted with uncertainties about how to advance students' learning while also building on students' contributions. In…

In 1999, Liping Ma published her book "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in the United States and China," which probed the kinds of knowledge that elementary school teachers need to convey mathematical concepts and procedures effectively to their students. Later that year,…

This qualitative study examined the experiences of three eighth-grade prealgebra teachers as they planned student sensitive lessons for their ethnoculturally diverse students. The teachers worked in a lesson study group with a diversity consultant, an ESL (English as a second language) teacher who had a variety of multicultural experiences from…

Problem solving tasks offer valuable opportunities to strengthen prospective elementary teachers' knowledge of and disposition toward mathematics, providing them with new experiences doing mathematics. Mathematics educators can influence future instruction by modeling effective pedagogical strategies that engage students in making sense of…

For the past decade, students at California State University (CSU) campuses increasingly lack basic mathematics skills. To address this concern, Executive Order No. 665 (1998) called for CSU campuses to bring students to proficiency in mathematics. School districts have struggled to modify their mathematics curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in…

This issue of the Center's "Systems Newsletter" will be the last one published under the aegis of Dr. JoyceVanTassel-Baska, the Center's founder and current Executive Director. As of this August Dr. VanTassel-Baska will officially retire from the College of William and Mary and the Center. She will still be an integral part of the Center…

This study examined changes in 19 teachers' beliefs across the first 2 years of a professional development program in cognitively guided instruction (CGI). The study involved five teams of mathematics teachers and teacher educators. Teams attended professional development workshops on several occasions. Each team met monthly to discuss their…