Examining pre-service elementary mathematics teachers' reading of educative curriculum materials

• An investigation of pre-service teachers' (PSTs) reading of elementary mathematics educative curriculum materials.
• PSTs tended not to read educative curriculum materials in potentially educative ways.
• Other ways that PSTs read curriculum materials included descriptive, evaluative, interpretive, and adaptive.
• This study has significant implications for curriculum developers, researchers, and mathematics teacher educators.

Educative curriculum materials are intended to support teacher learning. An assumption underlying the design of educative curriculum, however, has been that teachers will read features that are designed to be educative in educative ways. This study investigated what text features 47 preservice teachers (PSTs) attended to in their reading of 5 mathematics lessons from Standards-based curriculum series and how they read those features. We found that PSTs tended to not read educative text feature in potentially educative ways and instead read them in other ways (e.g., descriptively). This study has significant implications for curriculum developers, researchers, and mathematics teacher educators.