What We Know About Deepening Teachers' Content Knowledge: Engaging Teachers with Developing Conceptual Maps of Mathematics/Science Content

Research on Engaging Teachers with Developing Conceptual Maps of Mathematics Content

Programs for mathematics teachers can work to deepen teachers' content knowledge by guiding teachers in development of conceptual maps of student-level content ideas and their representations. These maps focus attention on how a particular idea connects to other content ideas, either those that were learned earlier or those that are being learned at the same grade level. One research study (Clark & Schorr, 2000) identified in a review of research on deepening teacher content knowledge investigated a professional development program that included this strategy for mathematics teachers. (See Table 1.)

		Mathematics Strands Addressed
Name of Study (Click on the study to read a description of how the intervention engaged teachers with developing conceptual maps of mathematics content.) [PDF 14K]
Teachers' evolving models of the underlying concepts of rational number (Clark & Schorr, 2000)	6-8	•

Findings from Research

The Clark and Schorr (2000) study of a professional learning experience that included engaging teachers with developing conceptual maps provided positive results on participating teachers' content knowledge. Although the study did not investigate the unique contribution of the strategy of engaging teachers with developing conceptual maps, the positive results suggest that the use of such maps may be an effective professional development strategy and a fruitful area for future research.

Teacher participants in the study ranged from grade 6 to grade 8. Topics in number and operations were addressed. The experience for teachers was structured as a course with meetings over 14 weeks, during which they worked through problems for middle grades students and developed curriculum maps to visually demonstrate their understanding of the interconnectedness among the skills and concepts in the problems. They then implemented these same problems in their classrooms and documented their students' thinking, revisiting the curriculum maps in the process.

Teachers participated in the study on a voluntary basis, so generalizability of the findings must be considered in this light. Although the study traced changes in teachers' thinking over time, it did not use a comparison group of teachers who did not participate in the professional development program. It is possible that participating teachers might perform better as time went by simply because they learned to focus on the ideas the researchers were assessing. As is often the case in published research studies, very little detail was provided about the intervention. Similarly, little information was provided on how the measures were developed and validated for the purpose of assessing growth in teachers' content knowledge.

For the research on engaging teachers with developing conceptual maps of mathematics content bibliography, click here. [PDF 7K]

The study described above was part of a more inclusive review of research on experiences intended to deepen teachers' mathematics content knowledge. For more information, you are invited to read a summary of research on experiences intended to deepen teachers' mathematics content knowledge, click here. [PDF 120K]