scholarly journals Prospective Teachers’ Beliefs About Mathematics: A Review of the Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
Katherine Baker

The Mathematics Enthusiast Special Issue (2014) presented an extensive review of the literature around the content knowledge of prospective elementary teachers (PTs). The issue excluded articles around PTs’ beliefs. Understanding research around PTs’ beliefs is important to understanding how to design and support their teaching preparation. Attending to PTs’ beliefs helps to ensure their content knowledge and instructional methods are aligned with reform-based mathematics. This article highlights a literature review that addressed the omission of beliefs and explored how teacher preparation might address PTs’ held beliefs.

Author(s):  
Meghan Shaughnessy ◽  
Nicole M. Garcia ◽  
Michaela Krug O’Neill ◽  
Sarah Kate Selling ◽  
Amber T. Willis ◽  
...  

AbstractMathematics discussions are important for helping students to develop conceptual understanding and to learn disciplinary norms and practices. In recent years, there has been increased attention to teaching prospective teachers to lead discussions with students. This paper examines the possibilities of designing a formative assessment that gathers information about prospective elementary teachers’ skills with leading problem-based mathematics discussions and makes sense of such information. A decomposition of the practice of leading discussions was developed and used to design the assessment. Nine first-year teachers who graduated from a range of different teacher education programs participated in the study. The findings reveal that our formative assessment works to gather information about teachers’ capabilities with leading discussions and that the associated tools support making sense of the information gathered. This suggests that such tools could be useful to support the formative assessment of the developing capabilities of prospective teachers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-463
Author(s):  
Keri D. Valentine ◽  
Johnna Bolyard

Past experiences as mathematics learners play a critical role in the way mathematics teachers consider what it means to know, do, and teach mathematics. Thus, understanding past experiences and ways to work with them in teacher education is a critical concern. Using phenomenological inquiry, we investigated moments of shift that occur along one's mathematics journey. The study draws on 30 prospective teachers' experiences in the form of lived-experience writing and interview data. Findings show that prospective teachers' shifts manifest in relations with others, across different time frames, and through material relations with mathematics. Most salient was the tentative and mutable nature of shifts, showing that shift might be better viewed as a possibility rather than a single event.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-116
Author(s):  
Theresa J. Grant ◽  
Jane-Jane Lo ◽  
Judith Flowers

This article discusses the challenges and opportunities that arose in attempting to support prospective elementary teachers in developing mathematical justifications in the context of wholenumber computation. Justification for whole-number computation is important for three reasons. First, this is the introductory topic in the first of three mathematics courses for prospective elementary teachers. Second, the number and operations strand is a major focus in elementary school. Third, in our experience as teacher educators, prospective elementary teachers have a difficult time considering how and why to teach whole-number computation in a conceptual manner. If prospective teachers' reasoning and justifications can be shaped in this area of mathematics, sense making and mathematical justification in other areas of mathematics can be shaped as well (Simon and Blume 1996).


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-134
Author(s):  
Ángel López ◽  
Encarnación Castro ◽  
María C. Cañadas

Este trabajo forma parte de una investigación centrada en la divisibilidad en Z+. Los sujetos participantes son maestros en formación. Uno de los objetivos de la investigación consiste en caracterizar los significados que muestran los maestros en formación sobre el concepto de múltiplo. Este artículo recoge los resultados obtenidos en relación con dicho objetivo. Analizamos las producciones escritas de 37 maestros en formación obtenidas en una sesión práctica de aula, diseñada y desarrollada en el contexto de un experimento de enseñanza. Realizamos la caracterización de los significados a través de los elementos del análisis didáctico: estructura conceptual, sistemas de representación y fenomenología. Los maestros en formación mostraron mayoritariamente tres significados de múltiplo: producto, relación y dividendo en una división exacta. Characterizing the meaning of multiple by pre-service elementary school teachers This paper is part of a wider study focused on divisibility. Participants were prospective elementary teachers. One of the aims of the research is to characterize the meanings of multiple shown by prospective teachers. In this paper, we present the results concerning this aim. We analyse the productions of 37 prospective elementary teachers collected in a practice session, designed and developed in the context of a teaching experiment. We characterize the meanings through the following elements of the didactic analysis: conceptual structure, representation systems and phenomenology. Prospective teachers showed mostly three meanings of multiple: product, relationship and dividend in an exact division.Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/39495WOS-ESCI


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