Mathematics Teachers’ Enactment of Cognitively Demanding Tasks: Investigating Links to Teachers’ Knowledge and Conceptions

This study sought to understand how aspects of middle school mathematics teachers’ knowledge and conceptions are related to their enactment of cognitively demanding tasks. I defined the enactment of cognitively demanding tasks to involve task selection and maintenance of the cognitive demand of high-level tasks and examined those two dimensions of enactment separately. I used multilevel logistic regression models to investigate how mathematical knowledge for teaching and conceptions of teaching and learning mathematics for 213 middle school mathematics teachers were related to their enactment of cognitively demanding tasks. I found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and conceptions of teaching and learning mathematics were contingent on one another and significantly related to teachers’ enactment of cognitively demanding tasks.