Pedagogical and Mathematical capital: does teacher education make a difference?

This paper explores teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and mathematical
content knowledge for both primary and secondary school teachers. Using established questions from other reviewed research, the research team posed a series of tasks for teachers to complete. The results surprised the researchers as they contradicted our expectations. Primary teachers scored lower on both Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Mathematical Content Knowledge (MCK) while secondary teachers scored (significantly) higher on both scales. Preservice teachers scored similarly to primary teachers. To explore this further we subsequently added a further cohort – engineers who were expected to have strong mathematical knowledge but little to no pedagogical knowledge. The results reported pose serious questions in the current political and employment contexts. The data suggest to us the capital building that may be facilitated through teacher education programs needs to be questioned as do many of the assumptions that permeate the field.