Abstract
Creating mathematics tasks provide opportunities for students to develop their thinking, reasoning, communication, and creativity. This paper presents a study on teaching pre-service teachers to create realistic mathematics tasks in real contexts and amending them through an iterative process of analysis and refinement. The study was undertaken with pre-service teachers from two university training courses in Spain, undergraduate students from a primary teacher training course, and graduate students from an educational Master’s course. The students worked in groups to collaborate in the creation of the requested tasks and improvement of them based on critical thinking and creativity. The tasks were not only evaluated concerning their level of realism, but also regarding their level of authenticity, the cognitive domains involved, and their openness characteristic. These are the key characteristics related to environmental and sustainability aspects. The outcomes confirmed that the creation of realistic mathematics tasks was a challenge for future primary teachers; however, they were able to create tasks with high levels of cognitive domain, authenticity, and openness. This evidences, on the one hand, the difficulty that future teachers have in understanding the realism of a mathematics task, and, on the other, the possibilities offered by the task’s creation and the revision activity, which has educational implications and opens paths for future research.
Highlights
Creating tasks should provide opportunities to develop thinking, creativity, and reasoning [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
After a thorough review of the literature, we identify the need to teach pre-service teachers how to create realistic mathematics tasks and examine how these future teachers can amend their own tasks through the processes of critical thinking and creativity
This study provides a form of training for pre-service teachers to create tasks in real contexts and amend them through an iterative process of analysis and refinement
Summary
Creating tasks should provide opportunities to develop thinking, creativity, and reasoning [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Realistic tasks are an especially relevant type of mathematics tasks In these tasks, the solver needs to take into account relevant aspects of the everyday life context in order to attain the correct solution. Realistic mathematics tasks require the interpretation and understanding of a real-life situation to solve a problem. This process promotes reasoning and constructive learning [18]. Creating realistic tasks through reflection and communication will stimulate sustainable aspects in education, such as creativity and critical thinking (Sustainable Development Goals [19])
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