Background
The
University of Texas at Austin is a collaborator in the Big XII Faculty
Fellowship Program to stimulate scholarly initiatives among the universities
that became affiliated through formation of the Big XII Athletic Conference.
The program offers faculty the opportunity to travel to member institutions
to exchange ideas and pursue research. Faculty visits usually last about
two weeks, but longer or shorter visits are possible. The visitor's
home university pays for the trip.
General
Report
Dr.
Petrosino left Austin on Sunday afternoon, November 3rd for Boulder,
Colorado to collaborate with his colleague Dr. Mitchell Nathan. Dr.
Nathan is a mathematics education educator and educational psychologist.Dr.
Petrosino first met Dr. Nathan in 1993 while both were at Vanderbilt
University and part of the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt
(CTGV). Since that time, the two have collaborated on a number of different
projects and publications.
Nathan
and Petrosino had collected surveys and interviews of pre and in service
teachers in a variety of content areas (English, mathematics, science)
and from a variety of places (Colorado, Tennessee, New Jersey, Texas).
This information had been analyzed and written for conference proceedings
(specifically the American Educational Research Association meeting
for 2002 and The International Conference of the Learning Sciences in
October of 2002). During the summer of 2002 and early fall of 2002,
Nathan and Petrosino collected additional data as per advice from reviewers.
The
purpose of this trip was to complete a manuscript that the two had been
working on for the past 6 months. The manuscript centered around the
fact that the importance of content knowledge for proficiency in teaching
practices is well documented. In fact, research suggests that more content
knowledge is always better (Borko et al., 1992; Grossman, Wilson, &
Shulman, 1989; Shulman, 1986a, 1986b). But is this statement completely
unimpeachable? Are there drawbacks for teaching that are specifically
due to subject matter expertise? In previous work, Nathan, Petrosino
and colleagues have drawn upon a variety of sources including historical
events, analyses of textbooks, and empirical studies of teacher beliefs
and decision making to show evidence for expert blind spot. Expert blind
spot is defined as the inability to perceive the difficulties that novices
will experience as they approach a new domain of knowledge that arises
as a consequence of well-developed subject matter knowledge. In education
it is evidenced by the tendency for educators who are also content area
experts (i.e. The University of Texas at Austin’s UTeach- Natural
Science pre service teachers) to perceive the organization of the domain
of study as the central organizing structure for their students' learning
experiences, rather than to base instruction on students' actual knowledge
and developmental processes.
Petrosino
then traveled to Boulder where he collaborated with Nathan in analyzing
the most recent data collected during the previous semester. The intention
was to utilize the BIG XII Faculty Fellowship Program to allow the two
of us to have a significant block of time to produce a manuscript for
a top ranked peer reviewed journal on the topic of expert blind spot.
Petrosino had previously incorporated the concept and application of
expert blind spot into his teaching at both the graduate level (EDC
385G Knowing and Learning in Mathematics and Science) as well as the
undergraduate level UTeach-Natural Science (EDC 371).
Products
The
final product from this collaboration was the submission in December
2002 of a manuscript to the American Educational Research Journal entitled
“Expert Blind Spot Among Pre-Service Mathematics and Science Teachers”.
The manuscript is currently under review. A draft of the paper can be
found at research.html.
Interaction
with Other Colorado Faculty
While
in Boulder, Petrosino also had an opportunity to meet with and discuss
various issues with other Big XII faculty. These faculty included Dr.
Ron Andersen, Dr. Hilda Borko, and Dr. Valerie Otero. Ron Andersen discussed
some issues of the current state of science education in Colorado and
the two of us discussed a recent journal article that Dr. Andersen published.
Petrosino met with Dr. Borko on issues related to evaluation of mathematics
teachers content knowledge. This was especially helpful since at the
time, Petrosino was also writing a proposal to the National Science
Foundation. Borko is one of the leaders in the field in this area. Finally,
issues related to preservice teacher education in mathematics and science
were discussed between Petrosino and Dr. Valerie Otero on a number of
occasions.