Collaborative Research: Connecting Formative Assessment Simulations of Mathematics Teaching to Classroom Teaching Practices

This workforce development-focused project studies tools for preparing new elementary grades teachers (K-5). The tools are designed for teacher educators to engage pre-service teachers in simulations of mathematics teaching practice and to provide them with detailed, individualized feedback that promotes growth and improvement. The project’s research goal is collecting evidence about how preservice teachers’ participation in these teaching simulations and receiving feedback might improve their instructional practices. The project involves undergraduate preservice teachers as well as teacher educators at five universities across the United States of America. Findings from the project will lead to a conclusion about whether using these tools leads to positive changes in classroom teaching. Taken collectively, this project’s outcomes will enable teacher educators to use the tools effectively and with confidence with an aim to improve elementary grades pre-service teachers’ mathematics instruction. This project includes three studies, and draws from both qualitative and quantitative analytic methods and data. First, the research team will study how well preservice teachers’ teaching practices with grades K-5 students is captured in their teaching performance on the simulations. In turn, it will become clear the degree to which the simulations provide an accurate reflection of actual teaching practice. Second, the research team will examine how preservice teachers receiving feedback on their teaching performance improves their performance during future simulations. Results from this question will signal the degree to which engaging in the simulations leads to improvements in teaching practice. The third study focuses on investigating how participating in the teaching simulations and receiving feedback on their performance improves pre-service teachers’ instructional practice when working with grades K-5 students. A total of 160 pre-service teachers enrolled in elementary grades teacher preparation across five universities that were purposefully selected to represent differences across USA contexts will participate in the project. The central issue under investigation is the set of connections among (a) a teaching practice that the simulation is designed to emulate, (b) observed performances of the practice in the simulation setting, (c) the presentation and reception of structured feedback aimed at enhancing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions making up performance of the practice, (d) the influence of the experience and feedback for improving subsequent performance in simulations, and (e) transfer of those learned knowledge, skills, and dispositions to increasingly authentic contexts of practice. Studying these connections via a validity framework creates opportunities to understand whether and how users perceive, engage in, and make sense of the simulations and the diagnostic information they yield, and the influence of resulting feedback. A goal from this project is to develop robust validity evidence that can help users make decisions about the use of teaching simulations within preservice teaching contexts, which in turn, can afford teacher education scholarship and practice to have greater access to high quality teacher preparation tools. This project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.