Title: Involving the Lay Community in Their Children's Mathematics Education: A
Fifteen-Year Perspective
Speaker: Deborah Loewenberg Ball
This session will provide an overview of conceptual-analytic scholarship
and empirical research on the role of mathematics knowledge in teaching and
in teacher education. Based on common sense and experience, many people
assume that mathematical knowledge is crucial to teaching mathematics well.
Although research has not been able to link the level of teachers'
mathematical attainment directly with their students' achievement, recent
studies have established ways in which teachers' mathematical knowledge
influences their practices. Three questions will frame the session:
1 -- What has research identified as sites of practice where teachers'
mathematics plays a central role?
2 -- How well do teachers know mathematics? What do we know about the
differences or similarities between and among elementary and secondary
teachers and how does that align with what we assume about these two
groups?
3 -- What do we know about teachers' actual and possible opportunities
for learning mathematics? What is common? What are the recurrent
problems?
The session will conclude with a brief overview of three areas in which
further conceptual and empirical work is needed in order to make progress
on problems related to the improvement of teachers' mathematical fluency
and its use in practice.