Guest Editorial: Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching: Developing Measures and Measuring Development

Abstract

In recent years, researchers' interest in mathematical that is specific to teaching has escalated. Its increasing importance has also influenced the content of this journal. Less than two years ago, a special issue that focused on mathematical for teaching was published in Mathematics Enthusiast (volume 11, no. 2). title of this issue was: The Mathematical Content Knowledge of Elementary Prospective Teachers. All of the articles in that special issue were written in connection with a review of 112 studies from 1978 to 2012 on the of prospective elementary teachers in the following five content areas: numbers and operations, fractions, decimals, geometry and measurement, and algebra. In their final article of that special issue, Thanheiser, Browning, Edson, Lo, Whitacre, Olanoff and Morton (2014) concluded that the number of articles on prospective teachers' mathematical content had increased over the years. They also found that most of the studies focused on static studies of knowledge rather than on how this developed. Fraction content was the area with most of the studies, and - across all five content areas - the studies showed that prospective teachers seemed to rely on procedural understanding, and most of the literature focused on identifying deficits in their understanding. In their conclusions, Thanheiser et al. suggested that more research should focus on characterizing prospective teachers' content and investigate how this develops.Our aim is that the articles in the present special issue, at least to a certain extent, contribute to moving the field forward in the directions pointed out by Thanheiser et al. (2014). focus of the articles in this special issue is on mathematical for teaching more broadly, and not only on prospective elementary teachers' knowledge. As a whole, the articles in this special issue build upon an assumption that strong instruments are of vital importance to measure - and thus to characterize the nature and development of - mathematical for teaching. Although all of the studies in this special issue draw upon the practice-based theory of mathematical for teaching that has been developed by researchers at the University of Michigan (e.g., Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008), the lessons learned from these studies may be relevant to the work of researchers who adhere to other views about the mathematical that is distinctly related to the teaching of mathematics. …