Examining elementary pre-service teachers' capacity to use children's mathematical understanding to select and pose mathematical tasks

Abstract

The need to design teacher preparation programs to ensure that pre-service teachers (PSTs) are prepared and equipped with knowledge, skills and practices to increase the chances that they will become effective novice mathematics teachers is of prime importance. Teacher educators are facing lingering challenges, since teacher education is contextualized to specific institutions and the field of teacher education still lacks an identified common curriculum (Ball, Sleep, Boerst B Grossman & McDonald, 2008). Therefore, little is known about how PSTs acquire the knowledge, skills and practices that they need to become beginning teachers. Specifically, very little is known about how PSTs develop skills and practices needed to attend to children’s strategies, interpret and respond based on children’s mathematical understanding. This dissertation research addresses this gap by examining the extent to which a group of thirty PSTs enrolled in an elementary mathematics methods course attended to children’s strategies, interpreted and responded based on children’s mathematical understanding as they progressed in their methods course. The PSTs were provided with multiple scaffolds during the course of the semester. The scaffolds were purposefully designed to support PSTs’ understanding of what it means to attend to children’s strategies, interpret and respond based on children’s mathematical understanding. The findings indicate that PSTs’ capacity to attend to children’s strategies and to interpret based on children’s mathematical understanding grew over time. There was a shift from limited evidence that PSTs’ interpretations were based on children’s mathematical understanding to providing robust evidence across two assignments. However, the results also show that PSTs struggled