Prospective teachers’ understanding on students’ learning hypotheses in solving proportion problem

Abstract

Prospective mathematics teachers need to comprehend mathematics competencies along with how they would teach it. This article describes prospective teacher skills in predicting students’ learning hypothesis regarding proportion problem. An explorative qualitative research was carried out to investigate how the students who were mathematics teacher candidates understand mathematical learning hypotheses. These research participants were 12 students during the third year of their undergraduate study. Data was collected from students’ written work and field notes during a focus group discussion about understanding hypothetical learning trajectory (HLT). The discussion was a part of Indonesian realistic mathematics education course. It raised a topic specifically how junior high school students’ thinking toward proportion problem. The result of this research highlighted that most of the prospective teachers comprehend the content aspect of proportion problem as supported by their answers. However, they found it difficult to predict various ways of students’ thinking. They could only propose at most three possible ways to solve the problem. They might be lack of pedagogical aspect in teaching proportion such that they could not think on how the junior high school thinking to approach the problem.