Expert-Built Professional Learning
Mastering Mathematics for the FTCE Elementary Education K-6 Exam
A self-paced, five-lesson course that prepares teacher candidates for the Mathematics subtest of the FTCE Elementary Education K-6 exam — covering student thinking and instructional practices, operations and algebraic thinking, fractions and ratios, measurement and data, and geometric concepts through narrated lessons, low-stakes practice, graded quizzes, and a full cumulative final exam.
Why This Learning Experience?
This self-paced professional learning experience is designed by an experienced educator to help you learn on your own schedule. Participants complete practical activities, connect ideas to real classroom practice, and build confidence through application-focused learning — with instant, auto-graded feedback along the way.
Learning Experience Overview
Mastering Mathematics for the FTCE Elementary Education K-6 Exam is built for one purpose: getting teacher candidates ready for the Mathematics subtest, one of four separately scored subtests that together make up the FTCE Elementary Education K-6 exam (the others are Language Arts and Reading, Social Science, and Science — each covered in its own course). As of January 1, 2026, this subtest is **35 multiple-choice questions in 70 minutes** — two full minutes per question, the most generous pacing of the four subtests. It is a hybrid exam, and this course treats it that way. The first competency is pedagogical: it asks you to read a K-6 student’s work or an assessment result and decide what the student understands, which strategy they used, and what a teacher should do next. The remaining four competencies test your own mathematical proficiency at the K-6 level — you solve the problems yourself, using the number lines, area models, base-ten representations, and other tools an elementary teacher uses to explain them. Preparing well means being ready for both: reasoning about how children think about mathematics, *and* doing the mathematics.
The course is organized into five lessons, each built around one of the subtest’s tested competencies: student thinking and instructional practices (mathematical vocabulary and problem structures, evaluating student strategies and assessment data, task complexity, learning progressions, and math fluency); operations, algebraic thinking, and number in base ten; fractions, ratios, and integers; measurement, data analysis, and statistics; and geometric concepts. The Florida Department of Education does not publish an official percentage weighting for this subtest’s competencies, so — as a course design choice, not as reported state data — this course treats all five as equally important, giving each roughly 20% of the material and about 7 of the 35 scored questions’ worth of attention, with equal representation on the final exam. A note on test conditions that shapes how the lessons are written: **a Mathematics reference sheet with the standard formulas is provided on test day, but no calculator is permitted.** So the lessons spend their time on recognizing which formula or model a problem calls for and on clean mental and paper-and-pencil computation, rather than on memorizing formulas you’ll be handed anyway. Every lesson follows the same rhythm — a narrated content module that walks through the competency with fully worked examples, an untimed practice set for low-stakes repetition, and (for the first four lessons) a graded quiz that checks whether the material has stuck. Nothing in the practice sets or quizzes repeats — every question across every activity was written fresh for this course.
After the fifth lesson, a 20-question cumulative final exam draws evenly from all five lessons — 4 questions per competency — so no single lesson carries more weight than another. Learners can move through the material at their own pace, in any order that suits them, and revisit any lesson, practice set, or quiz as many times as they’d like before sitting for the real exam.
Learning Outcomes
- Evaluate a student’s mathematical solution, model, or argument using correct mathematical vocabulary, analyze problem structures and learning progressions, distinguish the four components of math fluency, and interpret assessment data to guide and differentiate instruction.
- Represent patterns and functional relationships in multiple ways, model real-world situations with expressions, equations, and inequalities, determine expression equivalence, apply number theory and place-value strategies, and solve multistep word problems with checks for reasonableness.
- Compare and operate on fractions, decimals, percents, and integers using number lines and visual models, convert measurement units within and between systems, and solve multistep real-world ratio and proportion problems.
- Compute and interpret measures of center and variability, construct and read frequency tables and graphs, select appropriate units of measurement, judge whether a chosen measure fits the shape of a distribution, and solve problems involving distance, time, liquid volume, mass, and money.
- Calculate perimeter, area, surface area, and volume, plot and interpret ordered pairs in all four quadrants, describe the properties of three-dimensional shapes, and classify two-dimensional figures within a hierarchy.
Who Should Participate?
Teacher candidates and educators preparing to sit for the Mathematics subtest of the FTCE Elementary Education K-6 exam (test code 060)
