A Large-Scale Study on Teachers’ Knowledge of Common Student Struggles in Mathematics

Teachers’ knowledge of common student struggles is widely recognized as a key component of teacher knowledge across subject areas. However, most large-scale research has focused on measuring teachers’ awareness of student struggles, with little attention paid to how teachers interpret their underlying reasons. This study examined 743 mathematics teachers’ knowledge of common student struggles with ratios and proportional relationships, an important content area in the middle school mathematics curriculum. Teachers were asked to identify the most common incorrect student solutions to eight mathematical tasks and to interpret the underlying reasons for these struggles. While many teachers demonstrated awareness of empirically documented common student struggles, they tended to attribute these struggles to procedural issues rather than to conceptual misunderstandings. Hierarchical logistic regression analyses indicated that teachers’ awareness of common student struggles and their own content knowledge were linked to how they interpreted students’ struggles.