Creating an archival infrastructure: a comprehensive review of the evidence base for mathematics teacher affect and practices instruments

Abstract This study seeks to create an archival infrastructure documenting the status of mathematics teacher education affective and practice-focused instruments at a recent point in time through a literature synthesis. We searched 24 mathematics education journals over a recent 20-year period to identify relevant quantitative instruments. From the initial 2286 articles identified, we focused on a set of 164 instruments with some validity, reliability, or fairness evidence to describe: the different categories of constructs being measured; the different types of instrument present; instruments with explicit attention to equity; the sources of validity, reliability, and fairness evidence; and patterns in sources of validity, reliability, and fairness by instrument type. We found that the majority of the instruments identified were focused on affective characteristics of teachers and utilized questionnaires to collect data from teachers. Almost half of those identified affective instruments were focused on teaching (e.g., beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics). We identified 48 of the 164 instruments focused on teachers’ practices, with the majority being observational instruments of teachers’ classroom practice. Finally, we found that reliability evidence was most prevalent, followed by evidence focused on test content. It was much less common for authors to provide evidence related to consequences of testing or fairness. There were different patterns in evidence provided for different types of instruments. We describe implications for instrument users and developers as we seek to develop a robust set of quantitative instruments in the field of mathematics teacher education.