The educative potential of curriculum materials and their contribution to the learning of elementary mathematics teachers.

Educational reformers recognize the importance of teacher learning in the enactment of instructional reforms such as those spawned by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The curriculum materials used by teachers in their classrooms provide content and activities for students. The same curriculum materials could be designed as a resource for teacher learning. This dissertation examines the educative potential of curriculum materials and their contribution to teacher learning. A conceptual framework for analyzing curriculum materials' content for teachers and their pedagogical design for teacher learning is presented. The framework is used to analyze a sample of Investigations in Number, Data, and Space , an elementary mathematics curriculum explicitly designed to support teacher learning. This dissertation also reports on the learning of two teachers during their first year enacting the Investigations materials. Data were collected through 24 interviews and 40 classroom observations across an entire school year. Thematic analysis of the interviews and observations allowed exploration of the stability, changes, and relationships among teachers' beliefs about students, curriculum, instruction, the purposes of mathematics instruction, and themselves as learners. Analysis of lesson segments characterized and tracked the format and focus of each teacher's instructional practice. The analysis of the curriculum materials allowed comparison between the teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and practices and those advanced by the curriculum materials. One teacher made decisive changes in her beliefs about students, instruction and the aims of mathematics instruction and her teaching in the direction advocated by the curriculum materials. The other teacher's knowledge, beliefs, and practices remained stable. These cases suggest that teacher learning through curriculum materials develops through a dynamic interplay between the teachers' beliefs, contextual variables, and the content for teachers and pedagogical design offered by curriculum. These factors contribute to iterative cycles that generate opportunities for teacher learning and the interpretation of the information those opportunities make available. What teachers learn and do influences the next cycle of generation of opportunities for teacher learning and interpretation of available information.PhDCurriculum developmentEducationEducational psychologyMathematics educationTeacher educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132515/2/9965413.pd