Effects of concept-oriented professional development on secondary mathematics teachers' knowledge dimensions

Abstract

The prospect that teacher professional development (TPD) may play a key role in bringing about changes in teachers’ knowledge, and thereby in students’ achievement gains, is long-established. However, why many TPD efforts are ineffective remains a matter of some debate. Hitherto, empirical evidence on the reasons for this ineffectiveness has been less forceful in revealing how teachers’ knowledge bases should operate during TPD. This study presented trial evidence on the extent to which a content-focused intervention (for the Segregated Group) and a concept-oriented intervention (for the Integrated Group) could improve teachers’ knowledge bases. The former intervention focuses on textbook problems to refresh teachers’ subject matter knowledge, while the latter focuses on central topics or activities promoting the unit of meaning among teachers’ knowledge bases. During pre- and post-tests, teachers made preference judgments on a third party’s work, given in the form of a scenario for the validity of solutions, while their students completed mathematics examinations. Following each item, teachers were required to provide general comments on how they could teach the topic effectively. Additionally, lesson observations with teachers and interviews with students were carried out on three consecutive occasions during the intervention. The Ordinary Least Squares Method was used to test the effect of the interventions on teachers’ mathematical thinking/knowledge and their students’ achievements. Teacher groups were compared for their mathematical thinking/knowledge and their students for mathematics attainments. It was found that the Integrated Group teachers’ mean preference judgment scores toward correct mathematical thinking/knowledge were significantly higher, even when controlling for major control variables, compared with both the Segregated and the Control Group teachers. Moreover, the mean scores of students who attended classes taught by the Integrated Group’s teachers were substantially higher than those taught by the Control and the Segregated Group teachers. Taking the first observations and the first interviews as base categories, all groups showed improvements in the second and third assessments; however, Integrated Group teachers and their students achieved statistically significant higher results. Segregated Group teachers and their students also achieved significantly higher results in some components, when compared with their Control Group colleagues/peers. Analyses of teachers’ comments on how they synthesized their knowledge bases and students’ rough works showing how they solved problems supported the results of the quantitative data. This study, therefore, casts light on how to create an effective TPD model that can be contextualized to local capacities and needs.