What We Do
How Do Pre-Service High School Teachers Develop Essential Mathematical and Pedagogical Knowledge?
In this project, university faculty, doctoral and post-doctoral fellows, and school system personnel collaborate to design and teach mathematics content and methods courses and to study the learning that results from participation in the courses.
The research team is conducting case studies of individual teacher candidates to trace the development and application of mathematical understandings and dispositions of these students from the time they enter the secondary mathematics teacher preparation program through the time of their student teaching.
Faculty researchers for this line of work are: M. Kathleen Heid, Glendon Blume, Rose Mary Zbiek, and Martin Simon.
Developing Mathematical Understanding for Teaching
The Mid-Atlantic Center work on development of mathematics teacher knowledge has produced special courses on mathematical modeling, functions, transformations and iteration, geometry and computer graphics, and data analysis that help prospective and in-service high school teachers develop deep understanding of those core mathematical topics. This work is a joint effort of mathematicians, mathematics teacher educators, and Center doctoral fellows.
Research involves quantitative and case studies of students from two cohorts of prospective secondary mathematics teachers who have completed a significant number of upper-level collegiate mathematics courses. The central goal of this work is to construct theories that explain the development of deep mathematical understanding for teaching and to investigate ways that such understanding is or is not applied as the students confront the day-to-day challenges of teaching secondary school mathematics.