Assessing the Rigour of the Mathematics Courses Being Used to Prepare Primary School Teachers

Abstract

It was perceived that a good place to start in understanding why teacher graduates were not demonstrating expected levels of conceptual knowledge (CK) and skills, and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is to examine the written curriculum used in teacher preparation institutions. This study utilised a mixed methods approach to evaluate the courses that are used in five teachers’ colleges in Jamaica. Four content courses and one methodology course were collected from the Joint Board of Teacher Education (The accrediting body for Teacher Education in Jamaica). Four raters independently ranked each course objective on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model in order to determine the number of the objectives that are focused on the development of CK and skills. They also matched the course objectives of the methodology course against Shulman’s description of PCK in order to determine the number of course objectives that focussed on PCK. Also, N=6 teacher educators were interviewed to gain a deeper understanding of the findings that emerged from the curriculum evaluation. The findings show that 0% of the methodology course addressed PCK, making it likely for teachers to exit preparation programmes without being provided with adequate opportunities to develop PCK.