Exploring Mathematics and Science Teachers? Knowledge : Windows into Teacher Thinking

Globally, mathematics and science education faces three crucial challenges: an increasing need for mathematics and science graduates; a declining enrolment of school graduates into university studies in these disciplines; and the varying quality of school teaching in these areas. Alongside these challenges, internationally more and more non-specialists are teaching mathematics and science at both primary and secondary levels, and research evidence has revealed how gaps and limitations in teachers’ content understandings can lead to classroom practices that present barriers to students’ learning.

This book addresses these issues by investigating how teachers’ content knowledge interacts with their pedagogies across diverse contexts and perspectives. This knowledge-practice nexus is examined across mathematics and science teaching, traversing schooling phases and countries, with an emphasis on contexts of disadvantage. These features push the boundaries of research into teachers’ content knowledge. The book’s combination of mathematics and science enriches each discipline for the reader, and contributes to our understandings of student attainment by examining the nature of specialised content knowledge needed for competent teaching within and across the two domains.

Exploring Mathematics and Science Teachers’ Knowledge will be key reading for researchers, doctoral students and postgraduates with a focus on Mathematics, Science and teacher knowledge research.

Hamsa Venkat holds the SA Numeracy Chair at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Marissa Rollnick is Chair of Science Education in the Marang Centre for Science and Mathematics Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

John Loughran is Foundation Chair in Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Dean of the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Mike Askew is Foundation Chair of Primary Education at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.