Theoretical Frameworks and Ways of Assessment of Teachers’ Professional Competencies

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For the past decades, research on the measurement of cognitive elements of teacher competence has been growing significantly. Research on teacher expertise underlines the importance of teachers’ professional knowledge for the successful mastering of tasks that are typical for their profession.

A substantial number of studies have contributed to this by developing tests to assess teacher knowledge, predominantly in the domain of mathematics. Following the influential work by Shulman (1987), they differentiate mathematical content knowledge, mathematical pedagogical content knowledge, and general pedagogical knowledge.

Besides differentiation into such knowledge categories, methodological approaches vary across the different studies. Researchers have developed different conceptualizations of teacher knowledge and use different methods to access teacher knowledge as part of their professional competence.

While for a number of relevant studies the classical paper-and-pencil assessment represents the dominating paradigm, because it enables an efficient and reliable way to measure declarative-conceptual knowledge in large samples, others shift from paper-and-pencil tests to the implementation of instruments using video clips of classroom instruction as item prompts. Video-based assessment instruments are used to address the contextual nature and the complexity of the classroom situation. Thus they try to go beyond the limited scope of classical paper-and-pencil assessments (Blömeke, Gustafsson, & Shavelson, 2015).

Such a shift reflects the need for instruments that allow an investigation of teachers’ situational cognition and the impact of individual differences in teaching experience and in-school opportunities to learn during teacher education. Although knowledge acquired during teacher education and represented as declarative knowledge is probably of great significance, especially the research on teacher expertise has worked out that both declarative and procedural knowledge contributes to the expert’s performance in the classroom.

Several studies adopted this approach to provide a more ecologically valid measurement of the knowledge of mathematics teachers thus intending to measure knowledge that is more of a situated nature. With the growing popularity of video-based measurements in the field of mathematical teacher knowledge research, the necessity becomes visible that different approaches applied by various research teams should be brought together to facilitate dissemination and enrich in-depth discussion.

This was the aim of the Discussion Group at ICME 2016, which brought together the major projects on mathematics teachers’ professional competencies and thus forwards the exchange of research teams’ approaches and new findings brought about by their current research activities.

The following projects were presented in the discussion group:

• 1. Learning Mathematics for Teaching and Follow-up-projects (LMT): Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Heather Hill

• 2. Professional teachers’ knowledge and cognitive activation (COACTIV): Stefan Krauss and Werner Blum

• 3. Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M): Sharon Senk

• 4. Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics-Follow-Up (TEDS-FU): Johannes König, Sigrid Blömeke, Gabriele Kaiser

• 5. Knowledge Quartet: Tim Rowland

• 6. Professional competencies of educators in the field of mathematics (KomMa and ProKomMa): Katja Eilerts, Sigrid Blömeke

• 7. Subject-specific action-oriented teachers’ competencies: Anke Lindmeier

• 8. Learning to Learn from Mathematics Teaching: Rossella Santagata.

Hilda Borko closed the session by a summarising commentary.