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CAPTURING TEACHER KNOWLEDGE (TeKno)

The Capturing Teacher Knowledge Project is a four-year grant (2006-2010) funded by the Institute of Education Sciences.

The Capturing Teacher Knowlege Project examines the relationship between teachers’ ability to analyze classroom teaching, their own teaching practice, and student learning. Our aim is to evaluate the usefulness of a novel assessment approach to measuring teacher knowledge of teaching mathematics. The approach uses online video clips of authentic mathematics instruction, which teachers are asked to view and respond to in writing. Specifically, teachers are asked to discuss how the teacher and the student(s) in the video clips interact around mathematical content.

The video-analysis approach presumes that teachers’ ability to analyze teaching is reflective of their teaching knowledge. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from research on expertise in cognitive psychology and education. Pilot research on a proto-type video-analysis assessment yielded encouraging results.

One potential advantage of using video clips as stimuli (i.e., item prompts) is that it provides a means of preserving the complexity and authenticity of real classroom teaching and operationalizes it for assessment purposes. Teachers are able to comment on pedagogical and content related issues within the context of real classroom instruction. The video-analysis approach taps teachers’ ability to access the very kind of knowledge that must be accessed when making ongoing decisions in live classrooms. Analyzing classroom events might be seen as one of the basic skills of teaching.

Research Design

As part of the Capturing Teacher Knowledge Project three video-analysis assessments will be developed, each addressing a key topic area within the middle school curriculum:

(1) teaching fractions, (2) teaching ratio and proportion, and (3) teaching variables, expressions, and equations.

Score reliability and criterion-related validity will be investigated for each instrument. To examine the instruments’ validity the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) instrument, a measure of classroom teaching and student learning outcomes will be used. The project will also explore automated scoring of teachers’ open-ended responses to the video clips and compare it to score reliability obtained by human coders.

Contact

This project is directed by Nicole Kersting; Karen Givvin and Rossella Santagata are serving as Co-P.I.s; Frank Sotelo is the project research assistant.

LessonLab Research Institute is the independent research arm of Achievement Solutions at Pearson. Our mission is to improve teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms.

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