What Mathematics Content Do Teachers Teach? Optimizing Measurement of Opportunities to Learn in the Classroom

• Published in: Educational measurement, issues and practice Vol. 43; no. 2; pp. 40 - 54
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jiahui, Schmidt, William H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.06.2024
• Subjects: classroom instruction; content coverage; Diversity equity & inclusion; Educational tests & measurements; Mathematics education; Mathematics teachers; opportunity to learn; Quality of education; sampling; teacher survey
• ISSN: 0731-1745; 1745-3992
• DOI: 10.1111/emip.12603

Measuring opportunities to learn (OTL) is crucial for evaluating education quality and equity, but obtaining accurate and comprehensive OTL data at a large scale remains challenging. We attempt to address this issue by investigating measurement concerns in data collection and sampling. With the primary goal of estimating group‐level OTLs for large populations of classrooms and the secondary goal of estimating classroom‐level OTLs, we propose forming a teacher panel and using an online log‐type survey to collect content and time data on sampled days throughout the school year. We compared various sampling schemes in a simulation study with real daily log data from 66 fourth‐grade math teachers. The findings from this study indicate that sampling 1 day per week or 1 day every other week provided accurate group‐level estimates, while sampling 1 day per week yielded satisfactory classroom‐level estimates. The proposed approach aids in effectively monitoring large‐scale classroom OTL.