The Relationship Among Teacher Knowledge, Teacher Perceptions, and Student Achievement

It seems natural that teachers' knowledge should affect what students learn in mathematics classrooms. Indeed, research suggests that this is the case for high school mathematics teachers (Rice, 2003) and elementary teachers at grades 1 and 3 (Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005). Recently, a study conducted in Germany established that both content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in the area of mathematics were significant predictors of student achievement (Baumert et al., 2010). They also assert that pedagogical content knowledge was the stronger predictor of student achievement. A study recently published in Journal for Research in Mathematics Education by Campbell et al. (2014) makes an important research contribution by exploring the connection between mathematics teacher factors and student understanding. Specifically, they examined the influence of teacher beliefs and teacher knowledge (content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge) on student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. In the paragraphs that follow I will describe the methods used in this study, its results, and its implications.