PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
Questioning assumptions about the measurability of subdomains of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching(MKT)
Page: 1607
The goals of undergraduate mathematics teacher education include developing teachers’ contentknowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. As a strategy for conceptualizing and assessingthese forms of knowledge, researchers have further divided these domains. However, it hasproven difficult for research groups to create tasks to reliably capture a specific domain withoutinvolving other domains, leading them to question these subdomains. We argue that tasks’inability to measure subdomains separately is not evidence that tasks or theory are flawed.Instead, we propose that assessment tasks are effective in measuring MKT when they representthe work of teaching, rather than when they isolate subdomains. To make this argument, we usean analysis of teachers’ thinking in response to nine MKT assessment tasks. Though prior workprovides evidence that the tasks measure MKT, the tasks cannot be meaningfully parsed into thesubdomains of multiple established MKT frameworks.Key words: