This Special Issue on the mathematical content knowledge of prospective elementary teachers (PTs) provides summaries of the extant peer-‐reviewed research literature from 1978 to 2012 on PTs’ content knowledge across several mathematical topics, specifically whole number and operations, fractions, decimals, geometry and measurement, and algebra. Each topic-‐specific summary of the literature is presented in a self-‐contained paper, written by a subgroup of a larger Working Group that has collaborated across several years, resulting in this Special Issue sharing the final work. The authors hope this summative look at prospective teacher content knowledge will be of interest to the mathematics education community and will be a useful resource when considering future research as well as designing mathematics content courses for prospective elementary teachers.
The following sections in this issue provide background information on our overarching framework for the mathematical content knowledge of prospective elementary teachers as well as our rationale for conducting the summary of research. We briefly describe the intent and history of the Working Group that conducted the summaries, followed by the methods utilized in the summary process. Finally, we provide a description of what follows in each subsequent paper and close with our intentions of how this Special Issue might be used by our reader
