Abstract
In 1908, Felix Klein suggested that to mend the discontinuity that prospective secondary teachers face, university instruction must account for teachers’ needs. More than a century later, problems of discontinuity remain. Our project addresses the dilemma of discontinuity in university mathematics courses through simulating core teaching practices in mathematically intensive ways. In other words, we interpret teachers’ needs to include integrating content and pedagogy. We argue that doing so has the potential to impact teachers’ competence. To make this argument, we report findings from the Mathematics of Doing, Understanding, Learning, and Educating for Secondary Schools (MODULE(S2)) project. The results are based on data from 324 prospective secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) enrolled in courses using curricular materials developed by the project in four content areas (algebra, geometry, modeling, and statistics). We operationalized competence in terms of PSMTs’ content knowledge for teaching and their motivation for enacting core teaching practices. We examined pre- and post-term data addressing these constructs. We found mean increases in PSMTs’ outcomes in content knowledge for teaching and aspects of motivation.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our advisory board, external evaluators, prior data manager Lindsay Czap, undergraduate student Cleve Young who sharpened the qualitative analysis, and numerous graduate students who assisted in the scoring and analysis of this data. We thank our piloting instructors for their willingness to join us in improving the MODULE(S2) materials through their thoughtful insights, contributions, and conversations. Finally, we appreciate the PSMTs who agreed to help us learn how to better prepare secondary mathematics teachers through sharing their work and thinking with us. This project is partially supported by a multi-institutional collaborative National Science Foundation grant for Improving Undergraduate STEM Education #DUE-1726707, #1726098, #1726252, #1726723, #1726744, and #1726804. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.
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Lai, Y., Strayer, J.F., Ross, A. et al. Enhancing prospective secondary teachers’ potential competence for enacting core teaching practices—through experiences in university mathematics and statistics courses. ZDM Mathematics Education 55, 867–881 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-023-01485-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-023-01485-4