Chapter 18: Opportunities And Challenges In Surveying And Interviewing Elementary Teachers About Their Mathematics Curricular Use

Many teachers use multiple curricular resources to teach mathematics, which differs from previous decades when teachers often taught from one curricular resource. To better understand how elementary teachers make decisions about which types and aspects of multiple mathematics curricular materials to use and how they create coherence among them, we administered a national survey to 524 teachers and conducted interviews with teachers from three different locations. While conducting this research, we experienced opportunities and challenges arising from conducting research during a pandemic, collecting data from teachers across the country and in our own local communities, and learning from our own findings. This chapter elaborates the lessons learned from the opportunities and challenges of each. It concludes with implications for conducting future research examining the complexities of elementary teachers’ mathematics curriculum use in this understudied curricular landscape.