Unpacking Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Conceptualizing and Measuring Teachers' Topic-Specific Knowledge of Students

TLDR

Effective teachers possess unique knowledge of students' mathematical ideas, yet the domain has been under‑conceptualized and under‑measured by scholars. The article aims to conceptualize and create measures of teachers' combined content and student knowledge through multiple‑choice item development, piloting, and analysis. The authors developed, piloted, and analyzed multiple‑choice items to assess teachers' combined knowledge. Results indicate partial success in measuring teachers' combined knowledge, highlight areas needing conceptual and empirical clarity, and suggest that lessons learned can guide future measurement efforts.

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that effective teachers have unique knowledge of students' mathematical ideas and thinking. However, few scholars have focused on conceptualizing this domain, and even fewer have focused on measuring this knowledge. In this article, we describe an effort to conceptualize and develop measures of teachers' combined knowledge of content and students by writing, piloting, and analyzing results from multiple-choice items. Our results suggest partial success in measuring this domain among practicing teachers but also identify key areas around which the field must achieve conceptual and empirical clarity. Although this is ongoing work, we believe that the lessons learned from our efforts shed light on teachers' knowledge in this domain and can inform future attempts to develop measures.