Education Commons^™

Understanding Practice: A Pilot To Compare Mathematics Educators’ And Special Educators’ Use Of Purposeful Questions, Mary E. Sheppard, Robert Wieman

Journal of Human Services: Training, Research, and Practice

Despite calls for alignment, descriptions of best practices from special education and math education researchers continues to diverge. However, there has been little discussion of how special education teacher educators and mathematics teacher educators compare in practice. This paper describes a study in which a range of teacher educators (N=51) were asked to evaluate a series of questions asked in response to a struggling student with a learning disability. The results indicate that teachers from both groups ranked initial assessment questions highly, and questions that lowered the cognitive demand of the task much lower. Differences between math education and …