Research Trends in Mathematics Teacher Education

Book Preface

From November 1–4, 2012, nearly 500 faculty and graduate students in mathematics education converged on Kalamazoo, Michigan, for the 34th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA). Throughout and following the conference, many participants noted the high quality and richness of the scholarly work and of the intellectual exchanges at the sessions. An invitation from Jinfa Cai and James Middleton, the series editors for the Springer monograph series Research in Mathematics Education, to the conference co-organizers, Jane-Jane Lo and Laura Van Zoest, to submit a proposal that included expansions of select papers presented at the conference provided the opportunity to further share and expand on some of these important ideas.

The first task was to identify a theme for the monograph. Out of 319 research report and brief research report proposals submitted for review, over one third had focused on themes related to mathematics teacher education. This heightened interest in mathematics teacher education at PME-NA prompted the choice of mathematics teacher education as the theme. At this point, Keith Leatham was invited to join the editorial team to contribute his expertise in mathematics teacher education research.

To select the authors, the editors identified major themes related to mathematics teacher education in the 2012 PME-NA Proceedings. Three main themes emerged: (1) Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching, (2) Beliefs and Identities, and (3) Tools and Techniques to Support Mathematics Teacher Learning. These three themes thus became the three sections of this book. We then reviewed more carefully a set of 34 research reports and brief research reports that related to these themes and narrowed down the collection to 13 papers. We contacted the authors of these 13 papers to explore from 11 of the papers accepted our invitation. The other papers had already been expanded and submitted to journals for review. One set of authors, however, had written a related paper for the 2013 PME-NA, which we reviewed and found to fit nicely in the collection. This is how we arrived at the collection of 12 core chapters included in this volume.