Mathematical Sciences (21) This collaborative project is strengthening the mathematics preparation of K-8 teachers by continuing the development of a one-year college course taught in a mathematics department and by the creation of materials to support instructors teaching such courses. This new course provides pre-service K-8 teachers with a solid knowledge of elementary mathematics in a form that is immediately useful in classrooms. It incorporates recent insights into what knowledge is especially useful to teachers and it is structured in a manner that mathematics faculty and teaching assistants will find familiar, easy to implement, and appealing. The PIs have completed a textbook, focused on arithmetic, for the first semester of this course and have a preliminary version of a written second textbook focused on measurement and geometry. The central innovation is to base the course on the study of the exceptionally-clear elementary school textbooks from Singapore.
This project is also creating, pilot testing, and disseminating several sets of materials that include: (1) web-based problem sets and practice exams for students, (2) web resources for instructors, including a bank of carefully-selected quiz and exam questions, and (3) a manual that provides lesson plans and guidance to instructors and departments who wish to use this approach in courses for elementary teachers. The emphasis is on ease-of-use and relevance to K-8 teaching. The project design includes evaluations and several levels of feedback aimed at ensuring that this material is manageable, effective, and immediately useful to students and instructors.
This CCLI proposal was a collaborative project involving Louisiana State University and Michigan State University. The project focused on strengthening the mathematics preparation of K-8 teachers (a) by continuing the development of a one-year college course taught in a mathematics department, (b) by the creation of free web-based materials to support instructors teaching such courses, including an extensive databank of problems and lesson plans, and (c) by training college instructors in teaching the course. All three products are freely available to instructors at the website iremt.math.msu.edu. There is now a broad consensus among mathematicians and educators on the key motivating idea for this project: the existence of an intellectual domain called "mathematics knowledge for teaching" that includes mathematics content knowledge and aspects of pedagogy but is a distinct body of knowledge. Numerous studies, beginning with the work of Liping Ma and of Deborah Ball, provide compelling indications that teachers' knowledge in this domain has a significant impact on their students' learning of mathematics. Related studies have shown that many current K-8 teachers have serious deficiencies in exactly this knowledge. With this intellectual domain in mind, the PIs wrote two textbooks that help pre-service K-8 teachers develop "mathematical knowledge for teaching." These books incorporated recent insights into what knowledge is especially useful to teachers, and are structured in a manner that mathematics faculty and teaching assistants will find familiar, easy to implement, and appealing. One of the central innovations was to base both courses on the study of the exceptionally clear elementary school textbooks from Singapore. The materials developed for this project are an extension of the PIs work on the textbooks. The project created, piloted, and delivered an integrated set of materials, freely available through an easy-to-use website, that help mathematics departments implement courses for elementary teachers. These materials are: (1) a manual that provides lesson plans, guidance to departments who wish to use this approach in their courses, (2) web-based problem sets and practice exams for students, (3) web resources for instructors, including an expandable bank and catalog of nearly 1200 carefully-selected quiz and exam problems and an automated "exam generator’’ that makes it especially easy to prepare exams and problem sheets. The emphasis is on ease-of-use and relevance to K-8 teaching. The project included evaluations, feedback and repeated editing aimed at ensuring that this material is manageable, effective, and immediately useful to instructors. By making textbooks and websites that are easy for mathematicians to use and appealing to their mathematical sensibilities, the project was able to draw mathematics faculty and graduate students into teaching courses for elementary education majors. The website currently has over 200 registered users at colleges and universities across the U.S. who are using the website materials in their classes. It is estimated that over 10,000 pre-service students have benefited from instructors who have used the materials on the website. In addition to developing the website and associated material, this project also supported professional development for graduate students and instructors who were teaching the courses for the first time. In particular, the project played a key role in training over 20 instructors who taught mathematics courses for elementary teachers using the instructor resources available on the IREMT website. Most of these instructors were graduate students who have graduated and gone to other institutions, taking this valuable skill set into their careers.
