Book Description

NCTM (2000) states "teachers need to know and use mathematics for teaching that combines mathematical knowledge and pedagogical knowledge" (p. 370). Unfortunately, "teacher education across the 20th century has consistently been severed by a persistent divide between subject matter and pedagogy" (Ball & Bass, 2000, p. 85). The need for pedagogical content knowledge, and lack of attention paid to it, begs for research on its status and development within teachers. Understanding the pedagogical content knowledge of pre-service teachers is essential to informing and improving teacher preparation programs. The researcher in this study documented, tracked, and characterized pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in terms of knowledge of instruction and knowledge of student learning as they completed their senior-year mathematics methods courses and student teaching. The study employed a rubric (O'Hanlon, 2009) that measured various constructs of pedagogical content knowledge. The methods employed provided insights into the pedagogical content knowledge of pre-service teachers, including ways to determine and characterize pedagogical content knowledge. The results provided evidence that there is a difference between the pedagogical content knowledge that the pre-service secondary mathematics teachers displayed in terms of the constructs of knowledge of instruction and the constructs of knowledge of student learning. Further, these differences were evident to varying degrees on the different class assignments. Following and documenting the pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge throughout the class assignments in the study produced a characterization of their pedagogical content knowledge throughout the final year of a four-year secondary mathematics education program. The details and insight found in the study have substantial implications for the broader research community and raise questions that need to be examined in future studies.