Diagnosing Teachers' Multiplicative Reasoning
Oct. 2008–Sept. 2011

Principal Investigator(s):

Funder:
National Science Foundation

Description:

Diagnosing Teachers’ Multiplicative Reasoning (DTMR) is a research and development project investigating knowledge that teachers need to enable students’ learning and developing assessments of that knowledge. One approach, driven by accountability, emphasizes correlations between amounts of teachers’ knowledge and students’ achievement. Another, grounded in research on mathematical thinking, often uses case studies to investigate teachers’ capacities for identifying and building upon opportunities in students’ problem-solving strategies. Tensions exist between these approaches because instruments convenient for assessing large numbers of teachers are insensitive to capacities for reasoning, while case study methods used to investigate teachers’ reasoning are not practical with large samples. The DTMR project is building instruments that can be implemented on a large scale and that diagnose teachers’ capacities to reason about content in ways that support students’ thinking.

Related Publications:

Izsák, A., Lobato, J., Orrill, C. H., Cohen, A. S., & Templin, J. (2009, February). Psychometric Models and Assessments of Teacher Knowledge. Paper presented at the Eleventh Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, Raleigh, NC.

Izsák, A., & Lobato, J., (2009, April). Writing, submitting, and negotiating a successful DR-K12 proposal. Symposium conduced at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.

Orrill, C. H. (April, 2009). Assessing teachers’ knowledge in mathematics: Considering new approaches. Invited presentation to The International Center for Learning, Education and Performance Systems.

Templin, J. & Henson, R. (2009, April). Measuring the reliability of diagnostic model examinee estimates. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education, San Diego, CA. Templin, J., & Hoffman, L. (under review). Obtaining diagnostic classification model estimates using Mplus. Manuscript under review at Applied Measurement in Education.