Teacher knowledge,curriculum materials,and quality of instruction: Unpacking a complex relationship

The set of papers presented in this issue comprise a multiple-case study which attends to instructional resources—teacher knowledge and curriculum materials—to understand how they individually and jointly contribute to instructional quality. We approach this inquiry by comparing lessons taught by teachers with differing mathematical knowledge for teaching who were using either the same or different editions of a US Standards-based curriculum. This introductory paper situates the work reported in the next four case-study papers by outlining the analytic framework guiding the exploration and detailing the methods for addressing the research questions.