SURVEY OF U.S. MIDDLE SCHOOL MATHEMATICS TEACHERS AND TEACHING

在过去的25年里，三个主要目标推动了美国的教育政策：培养更有知识的教师，实施更具挑战性的课程，以及在课堂上培养更雄心勃勃的教学。然而，尽管在过去的几十年里，有大量的政策指导、实地努力和研究，但关于美国课堂上的教师和教学质量的全面和具有代表性的肖像却很少。相反，对这些主题的大多数研究都是以小样本或不具代表性的样本进行的，结果是很难确定在实现这三个目标方面取得了什么进展。与国家教育进步评估近50年来一直追踪的学生成绩不同，典型的美国学生的课堂经历仍然鲜为人知。为了解决这个问题，这项为期4年的描述性研究将从系统跟踪中学数学课堂上的关键教学指标开始，特别是教师的数学知识、现有的课程和向学生提供的数学教学的性质。为了启动这项研究，研究团队将在2015年从600名美国中学数学教师的全国代表性样本中收集数据。一项书面调查将在2005-06年度进行的基础上进行，以便比较教师在一段时间内使用课程的情况和数学知识。研究小组还将录制这些教师子集的教学视频并为其评分，从而能够描述当前的教学并与1999年TIMSS视频研究期间捕获的课程进行比较。调查和视频数据集都可以作为未来教学研究的参考，例如，调查学生参与数学思想发展的研究是否随着时间的推移而改变。研究团队将使用新旧技术来完成这项研究。邮寄调查将包括现有的项目，利用教师的数学知识进行教学，或教师在向儿童提供数学教学时利用的专业知识。为了进行视频研究，他们将邮寄平板电脑，让教师录制自己的教学内容，并将通过YouTube视频提供录制指导。由此产生的课程将使用数学教学质量(MQI)工具进行评分。MQI衡量数学课堂的关键维度，包括课堂时间花在数学任务上的比例，课程内容的数学完整性，以及学生参与数学思想发展的性质。调查的视频和数据将提供给其他研究人员，用于使用其他方法和观察仪器进行评分。教师、家长和学生将被要求同意提供他们的课堂视频。这项研究主要是描述性的，其他许多同类研究也是如此。然而，描述美国教学的范围可能会对该领域产生深远的影响，就像十多年前TIMSS的视频研究所做的那样。建立大规模研究教师和教学的方法将有助于评估和监测在实现广泛的国家目标方面取得的进展。

For the past 25 years, three major goals have animated U.S. educational policy: developing more knowledgeable teachers, implementing more challenging curricula, and fostering more ambitious instruction in classrooms. Yet despite volumes of policy guidance, on-the-ground effort, and research over the past decades, few comprehensive and representative portraits of teacher and teaching quality in U.S. classrooms exist. Instead, most research into these topics has been conducted with small or nonrepresentative samples, with the result that it is difficult to ascertain what, if any, progress has been made toward the three goals. Unlike student achievement, which the National Assessment of Educational Progress has tracked for almost 50 years, the classroom experiences of the typical U.S. student remain obscure. To address this issue, the 4-year descriptive study will begin by systematically tracking key instructional indicators in middle school mathematics classrooms, specifically, teachers' mathematical knowledge, the curriculum in place, and the nature of mathematics instruction offered to students. To initiate this line of research, the research team will collect data in 2015 from a national representative sample of 600 U.S. middle school mathematics teachers. A written survey will build on one conducted in 2005-06, allowing for the comparison over time of teachers' curriculum use and mathematical knowledge. The research team will also record and score videos of instruction from a subset of these teachers, enabling both a description of current instruction and a comparison to lessons captured during the 1999 TIMSS video study. Both the survey and video datasets can serve as referents for future studies of instruction, for instance, studies investigating whether student participation in the development of mathematical ideas has changed over time. The research team will use both old and new technologies to complete the study. The mail survey will consist of existing items that tap teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching, or the professional knowledge teachers draw upon in providing mathematics instruction to children. To conduct the video study, they will mail tablets for teachers to record their own instruction, and guidance on taping will be provided via YouTube video. The lessons that result will be scored using the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI) instrument. The MQI measures key dimensions of mathematics classrooms, including the proportion of class time spent on mathematical tasks, the mathematical integrity of lesson content, and the nature of student participation in the development of mathematical ideas. Video and data from the survey will be made available to other researchers for scoring with other methods and observation instruments. Teachers, parents and students will be asked to consent to their classroom videos being made available. The study is largely descriptive, as are many others of its kind. However, describing the range of U.S. instruction can have a profound effect on the field, much as the TIMSS video studies did over a decade ago. Establishing methodologies for studying teachers and teaching at scale will contribute to efforts to evaluate and monitor progress toward broad-reaching national goals.