Diagnostic Instrument for Teachers' Content and Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Numbers and Operations

Abstract Despite the agreement across teacher educators on the importance of teacher content and pedagogical content knowledge in creating meaningful learning opportunities for students, many existing assessments of teacher knowledge have not been designed to capture the key elements of these knowledge components, particularly pedagogical content knowledge. In addition, many teacher assessments do not provide insights into teacher proficiency in these knowledge elements, and this hampers teacher educator efforts to provide support in the areas teachers need and to conduct education research to determine the role these key elements of teacher knowledge play in student learning. In this study, the researchers aim to address existing needs by creating a diagnostic measure that will provide insights into teacher mastery of the key elements of content and pedagogical content knowledge needed for teaching. They will develop a diagnostic measure for numbers and operations, which encompasses a major content area of the elementary school mathematics curriculum. As part of the tool development, they will conduct a response process validity study, evaluate measurement validity and reliability using a nationally representative sample of 600 elementary school teachers, and examine the predictive validity, classification validity, and convergent validity of the measure based on a sample of 200 elementary school teachers. In addition, the researchers will conduct a cost analysis required for the implementation of the final version of the measure.