Question

Explain the importance of possessing a working knowledge of statistics as a special educator. If you do not understand statistics, what are some problems you might encounter as a special educator?

Answer 1

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Shulman states that teaching starts when the teacher reflects on what must be learned and how it will be apprehended by his or her students. In these reflective processes, beliefs, implicit theories, and other forms of thought interact with contextual variables to configure actions materialized in the classroom. Since the 1980s when Shulman highlighted teaching processes, research in education has distinguished 3 basic dimensions of teacher knowledge: content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge²(PCK), and pedagogical knowledge. This study addresses 2 of Shulman and his collaborators’ main contributions: reconsidering the study of teacher knowledge as a way to think about the role of content in teaching and presenting comprehension of content as a special type of technical knowledge essential to the teaching profession. When teaching mathematics in school, knowledge of subject content corresponds to what ^{Ma (2010)} conceptualizes as “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics”.