Teacher knowledge, curriculum materials, and quality of instruction: Unpacking a complex relationship

The set of papers presented in this issue comprise a multiple-case study which attends to instructional resources—teacher knowledge and curriculum materials—to understand how they individually and jointly contribute to instructional quality. We approach this inquiry by comparing lessons taught by teachers with differing mathematical knowledge for teaching who were using either the same or different editions of a US Standards-based curriculum. This introductory paper situates the work reported in the next four case-study papers by outlining the analytic framework guiding the exploration and detailing the methods for addressing the research questions. Keywords: curriculum materialsmathematicsteacher knowledgeteaching quality Acknowledgements The research reported in this paper was supported by NSF grants REC-0207649, EHR-0233456, and EHR-0335411. The authors would like to thank the teachers who participated in this study as well as Merrie Blunk, Samuel Eskelson, Jennifer Lewis, Rebecca Mitchell, Laurie Sleep, and Janine Remillard for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Notes 1. The US school system comprises three grade-levels: the elementary-school level (Grades 1–5, ages 6–11), the middle-school level (Grades 6–8, ages 12–14), and the high-school level (Grades 9–12, ages 15–18). 2. In fact, a recent study employing a more elaborated design (Agodini & Harris 2010 Agodini, R. and Harris, B. 2010. An experimental evaluation of four elementary school math curricula. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 3: 199–253. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) produced mixed results, showing one Standards-based and one commercially-developed curriculum to be more effective in improving first-graders' achievement compared to another pair of a Standards-based and a conventional curriculum. 3. All the teacher names used in this paper are pseudonyms.