Reflecting on the troubling relationship between teacher knowledge and instructional quality and making a case for using an animated teaching simulation to disentangle this relationship

Attempts to better conceptualize and measure teacher knowledge, and through that examine its association to instructional quality have been intensified over the past decades. Despite the progress made, a review of pertinent literature points to four challenges related to studying this association: proximity (i.e., the extent to which the measures of teacher knowledge and instructional quality are proximal to the actual work of teaching); alignment (i.e., the degree to which these measures are aligned to each other); comparability (i.e., the extent to which the instructional interactions and milieu are comparable across the lessons investigated and the degree to which the conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement of teacher knowledge are comparable across studies); and occurrence (i.e., the degree to which instructional settings provide the possibility for certain events to occur to study how teacher knowledge plays out in instruction). Teaching simulations that allow for the investigation of teacher action-related competence—a construct occupying the intermediate space in between static aspects of teacher knowledge and instructional quality—can partly address these challenges. In this paper, I present such a teaching simulation and explain how it can support the capture of teacher action-related competence, by manipulating instructional complexity and providing a productive platform for performing the work of teaching in controlled environments. I partly illustrate the potential of this approach for disentangling and unpacking the focal association, by presenting results from an exploratory study examining the association between preservice teachers’ paper-and-pencil mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and their action-related competence yielded by studying their performance in the simulation.