Investigating the Relationship Between Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Math-Specific Knowledge Domains

Abstract

Notwithstanding long term efforts to differentiate between domains of mathematics-related teacher knowledge, there is no doubt that different forms and aspects of teacher knowledge are interrelated and mutually influence each other. However, the nature of this relation is still open to scholarly debate. First, we give an overview of empirical studies that investigated the relation between different domains of mathematics teachers’ knowledge, notably, the domains of “content knowledge” and “pedagogical content knowledge”.Pedagogical Content Knowledge We demonstrate that the research on the relationship turns out to be multifaceted and we point to the need of cognitive orientated research on the integration of knowledge domains. Second, we present our own ongoing research on the integration of prospective elementary teachers’ math-specific knowledge domains by describing our use and analysis of task-based interviews. Preliminary findings indicate that our approach can help to identify mental processes that illuminate the integration of math-specific knowledge domains.