The nature and development of middle school mathematics teachers' knowledge

In this article, we report on the use of a teacher profiling instrument with 62 middle school teachers at the start of a 3-year professional learning programme. The instrument was designed to assess the aspects of teachers’ knowledge identified by Shulman (1987) refined by Ball et al. (2008) and extended to include teachers’ confidence to use and teach various topics in the middle school mathematics curriculum and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning. Based on a hierarchical coding of items, the application of the partial credit Rasch model revealed that the profile items were measuring a single underlying construct and suggested that the various facets of teacher knowledge develop together. We describe the characteristics of four levels of the hierarchical construct measuring teacher knowledge and understanding for teaching mathematics in the middle years of schooling, and discuss the unique affordances of a holistic view of teacher knowledge in contrast to considerations of multiple knowledge categories.