An Investigation Into Senior High School Teachers’ Knowledge for Teaching Algebra

Abstract

The performance of students has silently found its way into the hearts of various researchers and policy makers of which they have accepted the importance and the role of the teacher to play a crucial part in how students perform. As a result of that, several studies are filled with the fact that teacher knowledge affects student performance. However, the issue of which aspects of teacher knowledge influence student achievement has been a bone of contention among researchers. As a result, several attempts to measure teacher knowledge have relied on proxy measures such as the number of university courses taken, the type of degree the teachers’ have and so on. Using the expanded KAT conceptualization framework, this study was designed to investigate whether the seven types of teachers’ knowledge hypothesised will be corroborated. Two hundred and seventy-eight teachers from 16 senior high schools in the Eastern region and one public university in the Central Region of Ghana participated in this study. The cross-sectional survey was the main design used. Confirmatory factor analysis conducted on data from this study did not corroborate the seven knowledge types as hypothesised in the expanded KAT framework but rather three. Furthermore, analyses of data showed that preservice teachers exhibited high algebra knowledge for teaching than their in-service counterparts. Also, the study revealed that mathematics teachers with professional background qualification are relatively better than their counterparts without professional background qualification for teaching mathematics. It was recommended that in-service training on current issues should be organized especially for those in-service mathematics teachers to whip up their knowledge based in the area.