Outreach mathematicians are college faculty who are trained in mathematics but who undertake an active role in improving primary and secondary education. This role is examined through a study where an outreach mathematician introduced the concept of complex variables to junior high school students in the United States with the goal of stimulating…

This paper reports a study that examined the categories of pedagogical knowledge (knowledge related to the act of teaching) of novice ESL teachers as gleaned from their verbal reports of what they were thinking about while teaching and compared these categories to those found for experienced teachers in an earlier study (Gatbonton, 1999). The goal…

Our 5-year professional development intervention is designed to promote elementary teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and practices in teaching science, along with English language and mathematics for English Language Learning (ELL) students in urban schools. In this study, we used an end-of-year questionnaire as a primary data source to seek teachers'…

The Stupski Foundation has focused on the implementation of a comprehensive aligned instructional system as a critical lever for district reform. In the challenging environment of urban education, reforms focusing on only one system component (i.e., assessment, curriculum materials, professional development, resource utilization, regulatory…

Purpose: The overarching purpose of this paper is to empower K-12 educators, colleagues in teacher education programs, and educational leadership personnel to address social justice issues within communities where divergent perspectives abound. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use a discursive method to uncover the historical and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is the investigation of Chinese students' learning styles through managed learning environments. Despite the diversity of cultures in the world and the implications of it within the teaching strategies and learning styles, knowledge transfer across cultures has been one of the most challenging tasks for the…

In assessing the utility of a test, two issues stand out: whether it provides information of interest to test consumers, and whether scores generated by the test assist in making good decisions. Validity addresses these two issues, making an assessment of test validity the single most important product provided by test developers. Unfortunately,…

This paper describes how a frame has been used to articulate the intentions of a preservice chemistry education course to students of that course. The frame, which draws on appropriate knowledge bases for teachers of science, is also used through the teaching of the course as a diagnostic and development tool to assist the learning of these…

Most experienced high school science teachers are asked at some point to serve as a mentor to a novice teacher. While mentor-training programs have been established in many states, they often only focus on how the mentor can help new science teachers understand and negotiate the school culture, such as how the school runs and where supplies are…

Aggressive federal recruitment and training programs for teachers during the 1970s created a brief respite, but those programs ended in the early 1980s. Severe shortages of math and science teachers were rampant again by the 1990s and continue today. Especially in predominantly minority schools, many math and science courses are now taught by…

The current U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) emphasis on the preparation of teachers in content knowledge, and de-emphasis on pedagogy and teaching practicums, constitutes a major issue concerning how best to prepare a sufficient supply of highly qualified teachers. By contrast, federal policy represented by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act…

Mathematical tasks, centered on arithmetic word problems, are discussed as the basis of an approach to facilitate preservice elementary teachers' development of mathematical knowledge for teaching arithmetic operations. The approach consists of three groups of tasks that allow students to reflect on their initial knowledge, explore arithmetic word…

This paper provides a microanalysis of one Algebra I teacher's instruction to explore the advantages that are afforded us by coordinating two perspectives to document and account for the teacher's mathematical understandings. We use constructs associated with Stein, Grover and Henningsen's domain of mathematical didactics and Realistic Mathematics…

Research indicates that U. S. teachers' mathematical knowledge continues to be weak, and there is an inherent difference between the mathematical knowledge needed to be an effective teacher and that needed by a mathematician. In this article, the author discusses pedagogical content knowledge. According to Schulman (1987), pedagogical content…

This report focuses on two aspects of teacher supply and quality: (a) the under-representation of racial/ethnic minorities, especially African Americans in the teaching pool, and (b) teacher candidates' performance on licensure assessments, including general skills tests in reading, writing, and mathematics (known as Praxis I[R]) and selected…