Abstract

This thesis investigates the subject knowledge capabilities and deficiencies of teachers who wished to enter or return to secondary mathematics teaching and took part in the Subject Knowledge Enhancement Plus programme. It focuses on the proportions, types and causes of their mistakes, as well as their potential for development and the possibility of increasing their awareness of errors.The study uses recorded responses of 1602 participants from the online assessment of the courses, which ran across England. The assessment, covering the entire secondary curriculum and consisting of 643 questions, provided an interactive, multiple-attempt design allowing the investigation of the participants’ results development and error correcting trends during the course.Due to the large amount of data, statistical analysis summarises and presents the course results, from various perspectives with a user based average initial 59% and final 77% solution rate. Inferential analysis focus on different error types, particularly on persistent errors – indicating the presence of underlying misconceptions, solely via statistical methods in the proportion of 43% of all correction attempts. Deeper analysis of key test questions, those found to be difficult and prone to errors, and the relating response variants offers a clearer understanding of error types and participants' thinking.The research contributes to the field of teacher retraining by providing a reliableinsight into the SKE+ course results, indicating error proportions and causes of the participants and their capabilities for improvement – and introducing a statistical method for detecting misconceptions. It also indicates the impact of the examined courses in developing participants' subject knowledge and mistake awareness including the advances of the assessment’s work and error reflexion motivating approach.

Awarding Institution(s)

University of Plymouth

Supervisor

Vicky Bamsey, Nick Pratt, David Burghes

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2026

Embargo Period

2026-07-01

Deposit Date

July 2026

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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