Emerging Trends in Research on Math Teacher Professional Development

The goal of this study was to analyse international journals and conference proceedings published from 2012 to 2016. The main results indicated that the gap between the Arab Gulf Countries (GC) and the rest of the world regarding the amounts and trends of professional development (PD) research is too wide. At the global level, the initial scanning analysis showed the publication of 161 articles on math teacher PD, including 121 articles or abstracts published in conference proceedings and 40 articles published in journals. The number of articles on math teacher PD in the GC conference proceedings and journals was only 11. The results indicated that there is growing interest in research on PD in math and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The results also showed that descriptive research received the most attention, followed by developmental and evaluative research. Most of the English-language research used qualitative methodology and mixed methodology, and hence, used observations and interviews to collect their data. At the level of Arabic-Language, GC, research, the results indicated that developmental research received the greatest attention; however, all the data collected were quantitative because the survey was the most commonly used tool in these research studies.