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The Curious and Crucial

Case of Mathematical Knowledge
for Teaching

HEATHER HILL
AND
DEBORAH
LOEWENBERG
BALL

Teaching
mathematics
requires specialized
knowledge about the
subject, which
mathematicians
dont need.

R&D appears in each issue of

Kappan with the assistance of
the Deans Alliance, which is
composed of the deans of the
education schools/colleges at
the following universities:
Harvard University, Michigan
State University, Northwestern
University, Stanford University,
Teachers College Columbia
University, University of
California Berkeley, University of
California Los Angeles,
University of Michigan,
University of Pennsylvania, and
University of Wisconsin.

68 Kappan

October 2009

Good teachers know both content and how

to get it across to their students. But specifying this knowledge has proven surprisingly
difficult. A common approach is to require
teachers to major in the fields they will teach
and then add knowledge of how children learn
and classroom experience. But some argue
that the content knowledge that teachers need
is different from that needed by mathematicians or physicists.
Take the case of something as apparently
simple as what knowledge is involved in teaching operations with integers. Most adults remember a rule for subtracting negative
numbers subtracting a negative is the same
as adding a positive. Is knowing this rule
enough to teach this material? Note that this
isnt the same as asking what students need to
learn. Rather, we ask about the mathematical
understanding needed to teach this topic.
To focus the question, we drop in on Ms.
Gonzlez, a 7th-grade mathematics teacher.
She begins her lesson by using black chips to
represent positive numbers and red chips for
negative numbers. Adding one black and one
red chip results in zero. Her students have
been solving such problems as +4 + (-8) = x by
matching as many black and red chips as
possible, then counting the chips left over (in
this case, four reds). The model seems to help
her students solve addition problems.
But the next problem in the text is different:
Find the missing part for this chip problem.
What would be a number sentence for this
problem?
Start with

Rule

End with

Subtract 3

Ms. Gonzlez begins by modeling -1 (-3)

on the overhead projector by combining two
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red chips and one black, or -2 + (+1), which is

-1, and then subtracting three reds:

The students struggle with this representation. A student ventures that the answer is -1;
another proposes that the answer is 5; and a
third argues for an answer of -2. Many more
note that matching a black with red leaves four
reds, or a result of -4. Ms. Gonzlez checks the
answer in the teachers edition; the answer it
gives is 2. Unclear how to use the chips to
show this, she abandons the model and
demonstrates how to solve -1 - (-3) = 2 by
showing that the minus sign in front of the 3
and the subtraction sign combine to make addition of a positive.
What is the mathematical knowledge
needed to teach this material and to interpret
and use the text? Knowing the conventional
procedure is clearly useful, and Ms. Gonzlez
did know it. She is able to easily use it to solve
problems involving subtraction of integers.
But our analysis of the mathematical demands
of teaching this lesson shows that more is involved.
Modeling Mathematics in Teaching
One of the most easily observable teaching
tasks is constructing representations that are
both mathematically accurate and helpful to
learners. In this case, one of these representations involved using chips to solve subtraction
problems. As the teacher and student confusion shows, this task is far from straightforward. The representation Ms. Gonzlez created while mathematically correct cannot be easily manipulated to arrive at the soluHEATHER HILL is an associate professor at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts. DEBORAH LOEWENBERG BALL is dean of the
University of Michigan School of Education, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, and also the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education there.

tion. A more promising way is to interpret

subtraction as taking away (-3) from the initial quantity:

However, only two red chips (-2) are present. How can (-3) be taken away? The solution, as briefly described by the textbook,
would be to add another pair of black and red
chips:

The extra pair of black and red is equal to

0, so the total is still -1, but with this representation, three negative units can be taken away,
showing the answer as +2. This representation
is similar to what we do in multidigit subtraction when we rename the number (conventionally called regrouping or borrowing)
to be able to subtract. Had Ms. Gonzlez seen
this connection, she might have been better
able to support students use of the chip
model.
The lesson also requires facility with understanding and handling the mathematics
that students say and do. As in many of her
other lessons, Ms. Gonzlez encourages students to construct solutions and explain their
answers. Many of her students answers reveal
that they are confusing addition and subtraction of negative numbers. Recognizing this as
a common struggle can help Ms. Gonzlez
plan for and even prevent this confusion.
We are not criticizing Ms. Gonzlez. In
fact, once she saw the difficulty, she focused
clearly on the procedure. She also actively involved students in the content of the lesson
and trying to make sense of the material. She
tried creating a more realistic example with
money and debt to help her students understand, but the story she told did not match the
problem and was confusing. How do you represent 1 (-3) using money and debt? It can be
done, but it requires some care and involves an
understanding of net worth. What are other
situations that correspond to the subtraction
of negative numbers? Examples like this show
the mathematical demands of making mathematics comprehensible to students, and make
clear that the mathematical knowledge involved is more than being able to solve the
problems oneself. The simple instinct to
make connections to students lives turns

out to be more complicated mathematically

than it seems.
Teachers Mathematical
Knowledge
What must teachers know and be able to
do? Despite years of research and a wide variety of methods for measuring teacher knowledge, the answer to this question has been surprisingly elusive. Some have used teacher certification as a simple proxy measure for
teacher knowledge and quality (Ball and Hill
2008). Only a handful of these studies show
that high school teachers certified in mathematics produce somewhat higher student
gains than those certified in other subjects.
Many studies, some at the elementary level
and some at other levels, show no effects of
teacher certification on student outcomes
(National Mathematics Advisory Panel 2008).
What about courses taken or degrees attained as a measure of teacher knowledge in
mathematics? This indicator is closer to what
teachers may actually know. Not surprisingly,
this indicator is somewhat more consistent in
showing effects on students achievement, but
only in some studies. Such effects show up
only at the secondary school level; these same
effects are not present in studies of elementary
teachers (National Mathematics Advisory
Panel 2008).
These studies suggest that, though it would
be foolish to say that mathematical knowledge
is not important to teaching mathematics,
conventional content knowledge seems to be
insufficient for skillfully handling the mathematical tasks of teaching.
Because the evidence from this body of research puzzled us, we began to study teaching
practice. We sought to identify common tasks
of teaching that require mathematical skill and
insight. We observed many classrooms. As we
made progress in identifying and describing
these teaching tasks, we began to appreciate
the mathematical demands of ordinary teaching. We saw the mathematical understanding
involved in posing questions, interpreting students answers, providing explanations, and
using representations. We saw it in teachers
talk and in the language they taught students
to use. We realized that the capacity to see the
content from anothers perspective and to understand what another person is doing entails
mathematical reasoning and skill that are not
needed for research mathematics or for bench
science.

We realized that the

capacity to see the
content from
anothers perspective
and to understand
what another person
is doing entails
mathematical
reasoning and skill
that are not needed
for research
mathematics or for
bench science.

Deborah Ball and Algebra

Project creator Bob Moses
talk to Kappan editor Joan
Richardson about equity and
math education.
See Pages 54-59 in this issue
of Kappan.

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Kappan 69

R&D
As we investigated Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), we also began to
notice different domains (Ball, Thames, and
Phelps 2008).
Subject Matter
Knowledge

Common
Content
Knowledge
Knowledge at
the
Mathematical
Horizon

Learn more about the

Elementary Mathematics
Laboratory that Deborah Ball
runs each summer in
Michigan.
The mathematics class for
rising 5th graders is collectively
planned and studied by a
diverse group of professionals,
including teachers,
researchers, teacher
educators, student teachers,
and mathematicians. The
group meets each day before
class, observes the lesson, and
then debriefs together.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/
eml2009/home

Pedagogical Content
Knowledge

Knowledge of
Content and
Students
Specialized
Knowledge of
Content
Curriculum
Knowledge Knowledge of
Content and
Teaching

It was clear that some of the mathematical

resources that teaching requires are similar to
the mathematical knowledge that other professionals use. We labeled this common content
knowledge; it informs such teaching tasks as
knowing whether a students answer is correct,
the definition of a concept or object, and how
to carry out a procedure. But we also saw that
teachers required some specialized mathematical knowledge for example, being able to
model integer arithmetic using different representations. We also noted that some MKT
was more of a blend of mathematics with other
kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of students or knowledge of teaching or curriculum.
These blended forms of content knowledge
knowledge of content and students or knowledge of
content and teaching and knowledge of content and
curriculum appeared as finer-grained categories of what Shulman and his colleagues
termed pedagogical content knowledge
(Shulman 1986; Shulman 1987; Wilson, Shulman, and Richert 1987). Recently, weve begun to see signs of another sort of MKT that
we are calling horizon knowledge to describe a kind of mathematical peripheral vision needed in teaching, that is, a view of the
larger mathematical landscape that teaching
requires (Ball and Bass 2009).
We tested our emerging theories by investigating whether these ways of knowing and
using mathematics matter. We focused on several key principles that we hoped would set our
questions apart from conventional multiplechoice assessments. First, we wrote items to
represent the specialized knowledge that our
studies had led us to hypothesize were crucial
to teaching, such as being able to:
Interpret and analyze student work;

70 Kappan

October 2009

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Provide a mathematical explanation

thats intelligible to young learners; and
Forge links between mathematical
symbols and pictorial representations.
Second, we wrote items to represent the
mathematical tasks of teaching that recur
across different curriculum materials or approaches to instruction. These included such
tasks as:
Analyzing student errors;
Encountering unconventional solutions;
Choosing examples; or
Assessing the mathematical integrity of a
representation in a textbook.
We refer to our items as the Mathematical
Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) measures, and
they have been used by dozens of researchers
and professional development projects.
Administering these questions to large
groups of teachers has helped us and other researchers learn more about what kinds of
knowledge are related to student outcomes. For
instance, a group of economists recently administered a survey to 418 beginning teachers.
This survey included our measures, measures of
general cognitive ability, and measures of several personality traits, including conscientiousness. Of all these variables, only MKT was a significant predictor of student outcomes, with an
effect size almost double that of the general
cognitive ability (Rockoff et al. 2008). We have
found similar results in our own work involving
over 300 teachers (Hill, Rowan, and Ball 2005).
We also have found that teachers MKT is
strongly related to the mathematical quality of
their instruction, including their use of mathematical explanation and representations, responsiveness to students mathematical ideas,
and ability to avoid mathematical imprecision
and error (Hill et al. 2008).
Developing Mathematical
Knowledge for Teaching
How do teachers develop and use MKT?
Strong MKT seems to correlate with certain
habits of mind, such as careful attention to
mathematical detail and well-explicated reasoning, as well as agility with a variety of mathematical productions from textbooks and students. In other cases, teachers report developing their own knowledge through extensive
mathematics-focused professional development. In one of our own studies, we found that
summer professional development sites that

focused teachers work on mathematical representation, explanation, and communication

outperformed similar sites with less focus on
those topics (Hill and Ball 2004). Much work
remains to be done in this arena.
Given this progress in understanding the
nature of the mathematical knowledge needed
for teaching, several key questions and problems lie ahead. For example, can MKT be better built into useful instructional guidance?
Could Ms. Gonzlez teachers guide have
supported her understanding of the key mathematical ideas involved in subtraction of integers? Could it have offered her other representations the number line, for example
and not only showed exactly how to use them
but also compared their merits to the chip
model? More generally, can materials be designed that better support teachers work?
Tools and resources typically support professionals work in other fields, yet in teaching we
have left most of the reasoning to the individual teacher, based on the view that teaching is
a creative act that depends on context. Given
the intricacy of the work as well as the the size
of the teaching profession, this has been an inefficient and ineffective way to support highquality instruction (Ball and Forzani in press).
Ms. Gonzlez does not need to invent how to
represent integer arithmetic; this can be more
closely supported, leaving her the discretion to
make localized judgments about a host of
other important teaching issues.
Another important question is to identify
those aspects of MKT that show the greatest potential for improving learning. Is detailed
knowledge of place value of particular utility?
Are some representations the number line,
for example more vital for teachers to have
command of than others? Our studies suggest
that knowledge of mathematical explanation
and representation may be especially important.
Also, in order for teachers to have opportunities to learn MKT, those who prepare teachers and provide professional development will
themselves need to have adequate support. Better materials, more specific guidance focused on
the teaching of MKT, and better design of opportunities to learn from practice are essential.
Teaching helping others learn to know
and do requires specialized ways of knowing the domain. As we begin to appreciate the
special kind of content knowledge that it takes,
along with other kinds of knowledge, skill, and
commitments, we will be better able to support teachers to do this important work. And

in the end, if skillful teaching is better and

more systematically supported, the beneficiaries will be young people, who will get the inK
struction they deserve.
REFERENCES
Ball, Deborah L., and Hyman Bass. With an Eye on the
Mathematical Horizon: Knowing Mathematics for
Teaching to Learners Mathematical Futures. Paper
prepared based on keynote address at the 43rd
Jahrestagung fr Didaktik der Mathematik in
Oldenburg, Germany, March 14, 2009.
Ball, Deborah L., and Francesca M. Forzani. The Work
of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education.
Journal of Teacher Education (in press).

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Ball, Deborah L., and Heather C. Hill. Measuring

Teacher Quality in Practice. In Measurement Issues and
Assessment for Teaching Quality, ed. Drew H. Gitomer,
pp. 80-98. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2008.
Ball, Deborah L., Mark H. Thames, and Geoffrey C.
Phelps. Content Knowledge for Teaching: What Makes
It Special? Journal of Teacher Education 59, no. 5
(2008): 389-407.
Hill, Heather C., and Deborah L. Ball. Learning
Mathematics for Teaching: Results from Californias
Mathematics Professional Development Institutes.
Journal of Research in Mathematics Education 35, no. 5
(November 2004): 330-351.
Hill, Heather C., Brian Rowan, and Deborah L. Ball.
Effects of Teachers Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching on Student Achievement. American Educational
Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 371-406.
Hill, Heather, Merrie Blunk, Charalambos Y.
Charalambous, Jennifer M. Lewis, Geoffrey C. Phelps,
Laurie Sleep, and Deborah L. Ball. Mathematical
Knowledge for Teaching and the Mathematical Quality
of Instruction: An Exploratory Study. Cognition and
Instruction 26, no. 4 (2008): 430-511.
National Mathematics Advisory Panel. Foundations for
Success. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Education, 2008.
Rockoff, Jonah E., Brian A. Jacob, Thomas J. Kane,
and Douglas O. Staiger. Can You Recognize an
Effective Teacher When You Recruit One? NBER
Working Paper 14485. Cambridge, Mass.: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 2008.
Shulman, Lee. Those Who Understand: Knowledge
Growth in Teaching. Educational Researcher 15, no. 2
(February 1986): 4-14.
Shulman, Lee. Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations
of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review 57,
no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1-22.
Wilson, Suzanne, Lee S. Shulman, and Anna Richert.
150 Different Ways of Knowing: Representations of
Knowledge in Teaching. In Exploring Teachers
Thinking, ed. James Calderhead, pp. 104-124. London:
Cassell, 1987.

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