Using PISA to Develop Activities for Teacher Education (UPDATE)

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

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.