Developing Measures of Teachers’ Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching

TLDR

The article aims to design and empirically test measures of teachers’ content knowledge for teaching elementary mathematics. The authors review teacher knowledge literature, develop survey items representing knowledge for teaching mathematics, and conduct factor analysis and scaling to evaluate these items. Factor analysis revealed that teachers’ knowledge for teaching elementary mathematics is multidimensional across topics such as number and operations and algebra, and the resulting constructs form psychometrically acceptable scales.

Abstract

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 results from factor analysis and scaling work with these items. We found that teachers’ knowledge for teaching elementary mathematics was multidimensional and included knowledge of various mathematical topics (e.g., number and operations, algebra) and domains (e.g., knowledge of content, knowledge of students and content). The constructs indicated by factor analysis formed psychometrically acceptable scales.