What do teachers really need to know to be effective in the classroom? Whether you’re a teacher educator, an administrator at the school, district or state level, or a K–12 teacher yourself, you’ve undoubtedly wrestled with this question as you try to improve teaching and learning outcomes. Traditionally, states have answered this question by using separate assessments focused on pedagogical knowledge and on foundational content concepts. But this may not be enough. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Educational Testing Service have drawn on decades of study about effective teaching, and worked with educators around the country, to develop assessments that focus on the specialized types of content knowledge needed for effective teaching.
What is Content Knowledge for Teaching?
Content Knowledge for Teaching, or CKT, is the knowledge used in recognizing, understanding and responding to the content problems encountered in subject-matter teaching. Teaching is content intensive work that requires teachers to solve a multitude of content problems as they engage in the day-to-day and moment-to-moment work of teaching a subject. For example, teachers need to engage in a range of content tasks of teaching, such as selecting appropriate texts to meet the varying needs of developing readers, analyzing students’ mathematical work and errors, and determining how to represent content in ways that meet particular instructional goals. Assessments of CKT focus on the broad range of content knowledge needed to successfully carry out these and many other tasks of teaching.
How are CKT Assessments Different?
Conventional assessments of teacher content knowledge focus on foundational understanding of a content domain. Typically, teachers are asked questions that assess the content that students are expected to learn. Teachers use this foundational content knowledge, for example, in evaluating whether students have correctly answered a mathematics problem, or in demonstrating to students how to solve a mathematics problem. What makes CKT different, and central to effective teaching, is that it also includes many other types of content knowledge used in teaching a subject. CKT expands on conventional conceptions of content knowledge to address the additional ways that content knowledge is used in effective teaching.
Unlike conventional teacher content tests, which often look similar to student content tests, assessments of CKT focus directly on how teachers encounter content problems in their work. CKT assessments typically present a teaching scenario and ask the test taker to address a content problem as it is encountered in teaching. This approach to assessment can be labeled as “practice-based” because the primary focus is on content teaching, and from there on the content problems that are encountered in teaching a subject to students.
Examples of CKT Assessment Questions
Why is it Important to Assess CKT?
Because conventional assessments focus primarily on the content of the student curriculum, they do not assess the many additional ways that teachers need to know and use content to effectively teach it to their students. Assessments of CKT, on the other hand, focus on the recurrent tasks that make up the work of teaching and, by extension, on the specialized types of professional knowledge used in content teaching. Not only do CKT assessments focus on the content knowledge that should be developed as part of professional preparation, they also draw a direct connection between the content that teachers need to know and effective content teaching.
To learn more about the Content Knowledge for Teaching Assessments, visit https://www.ets.org/praxis/about/ckt
