Student Teacher Knowledge and Its Impact on Task Design Student Teacher Knowledge and Its Impact on Task Design

by Cannon, Tenille 1981-

This study investigated how student teachers used their mathematical knowledge for teaching and pedagogical knowledge to design and modify mathematical tasks. It also examined the relationship between teacher knowledge and the cognitive demands of a task. The study relied heavily on the framework in Hill, Ball, and Shilling (2008), which describes the different domains of knowledge in mathematical knowledge for teaching, and the framework on the cognitive demands of mathematical tasks in Stein, Smith, Henningsen, and Silver (2000).

Results of the study indicated that the student teachers used their common content knowledge when they lacked sufficient knowledge in other domains, especially specialized content knowledge, to perform a particular job of teaching. There was often a decrease in the cognitive demands of a task when it was modified by the student teachers. These drops were often associated with a lack of specialized content knowledge.