The project focuses on revealing and assessing the capacities (knowledge, abilities, ways of understanding and acting) needed by elementary teachers for productive use of mathematics curriculum materials. The project is guided by the assumption that well designed curriculum programs have the potential to contribute to improvement in mathematics learning opportunities in K-12 classrooms. Minimal research has examined the kind of knowledge and capacities necessary for teachers to use these resources productively. The project team will undertake research to examine and identify these capacities (referred to as pedagogical design capacity or PDC) and develop tools to assess them. A key resource to be developed is a tool to assess elementary teachers' knowledge of mathematics embedded in the representations and tasks in curriculum materials (Curriculum Embedded Mathematics Assessment [CEMA].
The project includes interrelated development and research activities. The development activities include developing the CEMA and developing and refining tools for gathering data on teachers' use of curriculum materials. The research activities involve employing these tools to gather and analyze data on teachers' curriculum use and the capacities critical to it for the purposes of both refining the tools and developing a conceptual model of PDC. These activities are organized into 3 stages of work. The Instrument Design stage involves designing and testing the CEMA and developing and adapting other tools to collect data on teachers' curriculum use. The Instrument Pilot stage consists of a pilot study of 10 teachers' use of 5 different curriculum programs using all project instruments in order to refine them and develop an initial model of PDC. The Instrument Implementation stage involves employing the refined instruments to study 15 teachers' curriculum use in order to develop a conceptual model of PDC, which will guide future research and professional development. In order to consider the role that particular curriculum features and resources play in influencing teachers' use of the materials, each of the 5 programs will be analyzed during first stage.
