Prospective Math Teachers Research Articles

Problem solving approaches of mathematics teacher candidates in PISA 2003

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a system of assessments that focus on 15-year-olds’ capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy in developed countries. PISA measures the level of awareness of real life issues and redefining these issues in an algebraic format instead of just working on algebraic problems. The students’ proficiency levels are related to their teachers’ effectiveness. Based on this assumption, the purpose of this study is to expose the prospective elementary math teachers’ methods on solving the PISA 2003 questions. The PISA 2003 questions are used to gather data. The students’ problem solving strategies are grouped among themselves with analyzing the data by using percentages and frequencies.

“VARIATION-TALK”: ARTICULATING MEANING IN STATISTICS

Little is known about the way that teachers articulate notions of variation in their own words. The study reported here was conducted with 17 prospective secondary math and science teachers enrolled in a preservice teacher education course which engaged them in statistical inquiry of testing data. This qualitative study examines how these preservice teachers articulated notions of variation as they compared two distributions. Although the teachers made use of standard statistical language, they also expressed rich views of variation through nonstandard terminology. This paper details the statistical language used by the prospective teachers, categorizing both standard and nonstandard expressions. Their nonstandard language revealed strong relationships between expressions of variation and expressions of distribution. Implications and the benefits of nonstandard language in statistics are outlined. First published May 2005 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives