Virginia's "Top Jobs Act", passed in 2011, strives to prepare more Virginians for employment in high-income, high-demand fields, such as STEM-related fields - goals that also drive the 4-VA Collaborative and the Virginia Tech 4-VA Grants Initiative.

Although our project targets PreK-8 prospective teachers who are not entering a high-demand field, research strongly suggests that the quality of PreK-8 teachers' understanding of STEM concepts and skills affects the number and nature of opportunities their students are afforded that develop interest and proclivity for STEM. Research findings also indicate that students who major in and ultimately work in STEM-related fields demonstrated interests in STEM before middle school. Additional research findings alert us to the reality that many PreK-8 teachers do not possess strong understandings of STEM concepts themselves and so struggle to help their students develop strong understandings of these concepts. If we are to increase the number of Virginians who are interested in and prepared to work in STEM-related fields, it is imperative that we find ways to support prospective PreK-8 teachers in developing strong understandings of STEM concepts.

Proportional reasoning has been argued to serve as a gateway to success in higher levels of mathematics. Helping students to understand proportional reasoning starts with building their understanding of fractions. It has also been identified that students need to be able to operate with the more advanced fraction schemes/operations in order to be successful with the Common Core State Standards pertaining to fractions. It follows that to prepare students to be able to operate with these more advanced fraction schemes/operations, their teachers must have previously constructed these more advanced fraction schemes/operations.

We thus need valid and reliable measures for assessing teachers' knowledge related to fractions and proportional reasoning; and further we need instructional models that specifically address the important concepts that future teachers need to understand in order to better teach their students. Our project focuses on these two main goals.