Ramping Up Teachers' Math and Science Content Knowledge

Joan D. Pasley

If today's students are to be tomorrow's math and science innovators, then their teachers must equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills. Yet research shows that many teachers, especially in middle school, don't understand important math and science concepts well enough to teach them effectively. How can school district leaders tackle this issue?

Some insights into this question may be taken from the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership (NSF-MSP) program. These projects pair a university partner with a K–12 school system so that the university faculty's math and science expertise may be tapped to provide content-rich professional development to K–12 math and science teachers. To date, the NSF-MSP program has funded more than 100 projects across the United States.

Since 2002, Horizon Research has studied NSF-MSP projects and reviewed research on the importance of teacher content knowledge in math and science. Below are some key findings on the importance of teacher content knowledge and tips for planning content-focused professional development for teachers.

What the Research Shows

A number of research studies have shown that teachers' math or science content knowledge is related to what and how they teach:

• Teachers who understand the content are better able to identify the conceptual "story line" in math and science instructional materials.
• Teachers who don't understand math well tend to focus on algorithms rather than underlying concepts. In contrast, teachers who understand key math concepts are more likely to use multiple representations to help students understand the concepts.
• Teachers who understand math concepts often present problems in familiar contexts and link problems to students' prior learning. They are also more likely to solve problems collaboratively with students, in contrast to less knowledgeable teachers who tend to look up correct answers in response to students' questions.
• Science teachers with deeper content knowledge are more likely than those with weaker knowledge to pose questions, suggest alternative explanations, and propose additional inquiries for students.
• When teachers with limited understanding of math or science concepts stray from their instructional materials, they sometimes misrepresent the concepts students are expected to learn.

The small number of available studies on the relationship between teacher content knowledge and student achievement suggests a positive trend:

• Teachers' understanding of math content was positively related to their students' achievement in four of six studies that were reviewed.
• Teacher understanding of science content was positively related to their students' knowledge in three of five studies.

More research is needed to establish a positive correlation between these two factors.

Challenge Teachers with Deeper Content

Math and science university faculty who design and implement professional development for K–12 teachers recommend that the professional development engage teachers with content that is more sophisticated than the level they will be teaching. The idea is that deeper knowledge will help teachers guide student learning.

Although math and science teachers involved in NSF-MSP projects often at first resisted challenging, content-focused professional development, they soon began to see the value. Project leaders reported that teachers who participated in professional development with challenging content did high-quality work far beyond what these university faculty had seen in other teacher professional development efforts.

Attendance at school-based study groups typically increased, noted one project leader, who said that teachers know "what they want ... they know what they need." Another project leader commented that teachers "loved delving deeply into science and/or mathematics" and realized that their increase in mathematical maturity and sophistication gave them "the confidence to explore different things, techniques, and instructional styles in their classes."

How to Design Content-Focused Professional Development

NSF-MSP leaders offer a number of tips for designing content-focused professional development for math and science teachers:

Be clear about the professional development goals. Consider what knowledge teachers need for effective classroom instruction: For instance, will the focus be on understanding key concepts in the adopted curriculum, how to teach specific concepts, or how to "do science or math" in general?

You can't do it all. Decisions will have to be made about how many concepts to cover in what period of time and at what level. One project leader explained, "You can only get two out of three—many concepts, short time, and deep understanding. If you address many concepts in a short time, you won't get deep understanding. If you have a short time and go for deep understanding, you can't address many concepts. If you want many concepts with deep understanding, you can't do it in a short time."

Select professional development strategies to fit the desired content, audience, and goals. Resist the urge to choose trendy strategies. Whether to have teachers analyze student assessment data or examine student work (for instance) will depend on the professional development goals, the concepts being addressed, and the teachers' backgrounds and experiences.

Study groups require skilled facilitation. Professional learning communities (PLCs) are a popular strategy that can be effective in helping teachers explore those difficult math and science concepts that they have struggled to teach. To realize their potential, however, PLCs must have skilled facilitators who understand the content themselves.

One project uses university mathematicians as PLC facilitators, pairing them with a middle or high school where they work with a group to investigate particular math topics. The content is at an adult level, with teachers engaged with challenging problems, some of which might be directly related to a mathematical topic for students (e.g., one middle school group focused on fractions). The purpose of this approach was to give the teachers the experience of engaging with math to deepen their own understanding.

Plan for a range of levels of teacher knowledge. Any group of teachers is likely to include individuals with a range of understanding. One NSF-MSP leader noted that they try to identify tasks for teachers to work on in their study groups that have "a low threshold and a high ceiling" so that all teachers find the work both accessible and challenging.

Plan for both immersion and practice. NSF-MSP leaders recommend combining intensive, content-focused professional development with opportunities to for teachers apply what they are learning to their classroom practice. A particularly successful strategy was to offer summer workshops focused on specific math or science content, followed by school-year professional development focused on classroom applications.

Learning content and how to apply it well takes time. Teachers will need time to grapple with the math or science content and to discuss what they learned. One teacher, after spending concentrated work on a particular concept, said, "It's coming in, it's fading out—I just can't hold onto it." Just like their students, teachers need multiple experiences with different ideas in order to master them. Particularly in science, where misconceptions are common, teachers' initial ideas may be resistant to change. It may make sense, then, to help teachers work through and understand a smaller number of science ideas deeply to ensure that they take hold.

Leaders of the National Science Foundation's MSP projects are firmly committed to the notion that K—12 mathematics and science teachers must deeply understand the content they teach to help students reach challenging academic standards—and to motivate students to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Their efforts have shown that although teachers may be intimidated initially by content-focused professional development, thoughtfully planned experiences help them see the value of learning more about the concepts they teach—and that they are fully capable of rising to the challenge of becoming experts on their content.

Joan D. Pasley is a senior research associate at Horizon Research, Inc., in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Editor's Note: This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant number 0445398). These writings do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Click here for more information about developing teachers' math and science content knowledge and lessons learned from the Math and Science Partnership.

ASCD Express, Vol. 6, No. 24. Copyright 2011 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.