Date of Award

Spring 2009

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership

First Advisor

Lawrence Leonard

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an intense two-week professional development program for middle school mathematics teachers, along with follow-up classroom visits, video review of lessons (with feedback), and two six-hour follow-up sessions each semester would improve teacher questioning strategies and promote higher-level questioning based on Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy of cognitive categories. A second purpose of the study was to determine whether, through reflection and instructor feedback, teachers would gain the ability to involve students in high press questioning situations. The third purpose of the study was to investigate whether relevant professional development would result in an increase in teacher content knowledge. The fourth purpose was to determine if there was a relationship between teachers' pedagogical content knowledge, as measured by the CKT-M, and their ability to ask better questions, as determined by Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy of cogitative categories.

The researcher used four statistical tests including chi-square test, z-test, t-test, and Spearman correlation. The population for this study was a group of 18 middle school mathematics teachers from southwest Arkansas. The instruments used for the study included several forms created by the instructor team as well as the Content Knowledge for Teaching-Mathematics pre-test and post-test. Prior to gathering data, human use forms and participant consent forms were completed from both Southern Arkansas University and Louisiana Tech University. In addition each teacher was required to have parental consent for each student involved in the video recording. Results showed iv significance in the first three of four hypotheses. Significance was found in the first hypothesis using a chi-square test that compared the number of high-level questions asked in the first video compared to the number of high-level questions asked in the last video. Significance was found in the second hypothesis using a two-proportion z-test that compared the number of high-press exchanges in the first video to the number in the last video. Significance was found in the third hypothesis using a paired t-test that compared the pre-test score to the post-test score on the CKT-M. There was no significant relationship found between teachers' pedagogical content knowledge on the post-test and teachers' use of high-level questions as defined by Bloom's (1956) Taxonomy.

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