Using PISA to Develop Activities for Teacher Education (UPDATE)

This project uses items and data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to develop two kinds of resources for preparation and professional development of secondary mathematics teachers: one in the form of prototype professional learning materials and a second in the form of PISA-based, research-grounded articles written for mathematics teachers and teacher educators. Work on both resources will focus on algebra and quantitative literacy and on factors influencing educational equity.

Full Description

The UPDATE project seeks to enable significant advances in K-12 teacher and student learning of mathematics by using of items and data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in ways that enhance the work of mathematics teachers and teacher educators. We hypothesize that PISA can be useful to the field in much the same way as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has long served as a key source of information for the mathematics education community. In contrast to NAEP and TIMSS, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the area of mathematics has received little or no attention within the U.S. mathematics education community, beyond noting that the performance of U.S. students is mediocre compared to that of students in many other countries in Asia and Europe. A consequence of the lack of attention to PISA in the U.S. is that we have underutilized a potentially valuable source of information for improvement of mathematics education.

In this project we use PISA as a base to develop resources for mathematics educators to use in teacher education settings. One type of resource comes in the form of prototype professional learning materials that provide opportunities for teachers and students to analyze complex mathematical tasks and student responses to those tasks, focusing on both the mathematics entailed in the task and the understandings of mathematics reflected in students’ responses. The materials will be designed to engage teachers in individual and collaborative inquiry aimed at developing their specialized content knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. Materials will be field tested in preservice and inservice teacher professional education settings and also shared at regional and national meetings. A second type of resource comes in the form of PISA-based, research-grounded articles written specifically for mathematics teachers and teacher educators and published in journals that reach these audiences. The articles will be informed not only by our experiences in developing and using the prototype materials, but also by the findings of selected secondary analyses of data collected in the 2003 PISA assessment.

Our work is organized around three distinct focus areas: (1) Algebra – a traditional content topic familiar to mathematics teachers that can be approached in a novel way through PISA tasks; (2) Quantitative Literacy – a nontraditional content topic less familiar to mathematics teachers that can be accessed directly through PISA tasks, and (3) Equity – an issue of import to mathematics educators that can be examined carefully using PISA data. In each component our work blends research inquiry and development, integrating the analysis of tasks and data from the PISA mathematics assessment with the creation of prototype teacher education materials and the preparation of PISA-based, research-grounded articles for teachers and teacher educators.

The results of this exploratory study will be disseminated broadly, and they are likely to generate new activity in research and development related to PISA. Mirroring the tradition of the interpretive reports of NAEP results, we will produce PISA-based resources that can have a significant impact on the mathematics education community as teachers, teacher educators, and graduate students examine the materials and reports we produce and use them to improve the quality of teacher and student learning of mathematics.

This exploratory project led by faculty from the University of Michigan uses items and data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to develop two kinds of resources for preparation and professional development of secondary mathematics teachers. One type of resource comes in the form of prototype professional learning materials that provide opportunities for teachers and students to analyze complex mathematical tasks and student responses to those tasks, focusing on both the mathematics entailed in the task and the understandings of mathematics reflected in students' responses. A second type of resource comes in the form of PISA-based, research-grounded articles written specifically for mathematics teachers and teacher educators. Work on both resources will focus on the critical content areas of algebra and quantitative literacy and on factors influencing educational equity.

The project is driven by the hypothesis that PISA assessment instruments and findings can be useful to teachers in much the way that prior analyses of NAEP frameworks, items, and data have been. To address the first project objective, the research team will use selected PISA items and student responses to those items to design, develop, and test a collection of professional learning tasks that engage mathematics teachers in individual and collaborative inquiry aimed at enhancing their specialized content knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. To address the second project objective, the research team will prepare articles for practitioner journals that will be informed by experiences in developing and using the prototype materials, but also by the findings of selected secondary analyses of data collected in the 2003 PISA assessment.

The results of this work will be a collection of resources for use in various teacher preparation and professional development settings to stimulate thinking of secondary mathematics teachers about issues of curriculum content, student learning, teaching, and assessment.

PROJECT KEYWORDS

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