Measuring Pre-service Primary Teachers’ Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics

Source: Mathematics Teacher Education and Development, Vol 14, No 2, 2012

This article reports on the knowledge for teaching mathematics of 294 pre-service primary teachers from seven Australian universities participating in a project aimed at establishing a culture of evidence-based improvement of teacher education.

Rasch measurement techniques were used to validate and obtain performance measures on an overall Teacher Knowledge scale and three subscales (beliefs, content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge).

The authors discuss the relative difficulties of items on each of the three subscales and differences between the participants’ performances on each subscale. Furthermore, the authors examine the differences between the participants’ performances on each subscale and the overall scale according to level of education, previous mathematics study, course type, mode of study, and confidence to teach mathematics at the grade levels for which they were being prepared. The findings contribute to the establishment of an evidence-base for pre-service teacher education.