A scaling-up study of the SimCalc approach revealed significant learning gains that were robust across demographic and regional variation in teachers and students. In order to determine what might have contributed to these gains, we theorized that students’ opportunities to engage with content would be a significant source of information about what and how students learned. We developed a representational tool we call Content Maps that we used to analyze the content of classroom discourse around mathematical tasks. Maps that were generated from three teachers’ enactments of three lessons reveal the various ways in which these teachers drew on their mathematical knowledge in whole-class discussion. These maps may therefore prove to be a more useful assessment of their mathematical knowledge as a learning resource than quantitative measures of their mathematical knowledge for teaching.

Session Type: Brief Research Report