A Study Of Prospective Teachers’ Mathematical Knowledge For Teaching And How To Develop It

In the past two decades, an increasing number of researches have shown that teachers " knowledge and skills not only impact students" classroom experience and their mathematical cognitive outcome, but also impact the implementation of the mathematics education reform. Many scholars have devoted themselves to investigate in-service teachers’ mathematics knowledge. Meanwhile, what knowledge pre-service teachers should have is paid close attention to. How to promote the development of teachers" knowledge is becoming a challenging task.Empirical researches on mathematics teachers’ knowledge have experienced several different orientations, from focusing on features of teachers, to teachers’ mathematical knowledge, and to the holistic knowledge construct. Recently, an increasing number of researches have switched the concentration to instruction and students, and measuring "mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT)". Given that the scarcity of researches on the preparation of prospective teachers’ mathematics knowledge, and lack of systematical investigation of the development of teachers knowledge, this study investigates the status of prospective mathematics teachers’ MKT in mainland, and explores the effective strategies to promote prospective teachers’ MKT.This study was conducted in two stages. Firstly, PT-MKT framework was developed. And, the questionnaire measuring PT-MKT were developed on the basis of the framework. Secondly, by implementing the quasi-experiment, namely an intervention based on the video analysis of classroom instruction, this study explores the influence of intervention on prospective teachers’ MKT, learning motivation and the ability of analyzing instruction.The following conclusions can be found in the study:(1) The prospective mathematics teachers’ overall level of MKT is not optimistic, which can be especially represented in the various sub-categories. Expect for their excellent performance on common content knowledge, their specialized content knowledge, knowledge of content and students, knowledge of content and teaching are all very limited, and their horizon content knowledge is especially weak. In addition, the level of the subject matter knowledge of prospective mathematics teachers is significantly higher than that of their pedagogical content knowledge. (2) The MKT level of the prospective teachers who come from the key normal university is significantly higher than that of the prospective teachers who come from ordinary normal university. The difference is mainly reflected in three sub-categories, which respectively are specialized content knowledge, horizon content knowledge and knowledge of content and students.(3) The intervention program based on the video analysis of classroom instruction has promoted the prospective mathematics teachers in their ability to analyze instruction and learning motivation, as well as their development of MKT.Finally, some implications and suggestions are proposed for future research.