Many policies and curricula have been designed in recent years to help teachers understand and improve their teaching of elementary mathematics. The challenge for teachers is to develop strategies for using standards-based curriculum materials in ways that construct coherence across various policy and accountability messages and support students' learning. The goal of Phase 1 of this research is to develop a data-driven conceptual framework for understanding the resources, understandings, and contexts that frame teachers' uses of curriculum materials. This research will contribute to the field's understanding of teachers' use of standards-based curriculum materials by situating teachers' curriculum use strategies in multiple curricular, policy, and developmental contexts and by linking these strategies to student achievement. In Phase 2, the goal is to design a pre-service teacher learning tool based on this conceptual framework and document the effects of this tool on pre-service teachers' beliefs and practices with respect to curriculum materials.

The central research activities include multiple classroom observations and interviews with 3rd and 4th-grade teachers over two years, focused on the ways in which teachers notice, read, evaluate, adapt, and integrate curriculum materials and other instructional resources in interactions with students. The central educational activities include involving students from a graduate curriculum course in the design of the pre-service teacher learning tool and then implementing this tool with two cohorts of undergraduate elementary mathematics methods students at Iowa State University. Educational materials developed during this project will be accessible and relevant to pre-service teachers and teacher educators in a variety of settings; the digital nature of the materials will allow for broad dissemination.