In this study, we explored elementary preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) competence to make diagnostic inferences about students’ levels of understanding of fractions and their approaches to developing appropriate tiered assessment items. Although recent studies have investigated beginning teachers’ diagnostic competency, teachers’ ability to design and evaluate diagnostic assessment items has remained largely underexplored. Fifty-seven PSTs, who enrolled in a mathematics methods course at a midwestern university in the U.S., participated in developing and attempting to differentiate diagnostic assessment items considering individual students’ varied levels of understanding. An inductive content analysis approach was used in identifying general patterns of PSTs’ approaches and strategies in designing and revising tiered assessment items. Our findings revealed the following: (a) the PSTs were well versed in students’ cognitive difficulties; (b) when modifying the core questions to be more or less difficult, the PSTs predominantly used strategies related to procedural fluency of the questions; and (c) some strategies PSTs used to modify questions did not necessarily yield the intended level of difficulty. Further, we discussed the challenges and opportunities teacher education programs face in teaching PSTs how to effectively design tiered assessment items.
Oftentimes, novice teacher educators need to navigate social and institutional context when they transitioned from teachers to teacher educators. This is particularly true for minority teacher educators. To date, studies on pedagogical challenges that minority teacher educators encountered when teaching in a dominating foreign culture are understudied. This paper concerns pedagogical challenges of two novice teacher educators teaching in a transcultural context where their home languages and cultures are marginalized relative to the U.S. mainstream culture. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigated our own pedagogical challenges related to language, culture, and power structure through the notion of third space. In a teacher preparation program at a mid-western university, we as doctoral students taught white teacher candidates in courses of world language and elementary mathematics methods, respectively. We position ourselves as immigrant MTEs from China and South Korea. The study focuses our reflection on teaching practices as novice teacher educators in the U.S. and the relationships of these practices to personal and professional life experiences in home countries. We collected the data by interviewing each other with topics, such as our teaching practices and pedagogical challenges. We analyzed the data by coding inductively and deductively. To increase the reliability and creditability of our analysis process, we did a cross check by examining each other’s selected interview excerpts and codes that we labeled. We presented three findings on pedagogical challenges pertaining to language, culture, and sociopolitical dimensions and how we negotiated our perspectives of teaching and learning. This study has implications on supporting minority teacher educators and the pedagogy of teacher education.
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