Dissertation

Secondary pre-service teachers' recognition of students' mathematical reasoning

Lieberman, Melissa

2014

Overview

Maher and colleagues have developed a professional development model to help teachers learn to attend to student reasoning (Maher, Landis, & Palius, 2010). This model was built on the idea that teachers first should improve their own reasoning skills in order to be better prepared to attend to student reasoning. In-service interventions using this model have consisted of teachers solving a variety of mathematical problems that previously were given to students to solve, teacher analysis of written student problem solutions, teacher analysis of student solutions from video, and an analysis of student solutions by the teacher after a planned classroom implementation of the problem-solving activity. A variation on the above-mentioned intervention model has been described for use with for secondary pre-service mathematics teachers (Palius, M. F. & Maher, C. A., 2011). An interesting vantage point of pre-service teachers as a study population is that they have not yet been influenced by a school’s agenda or faculty room discourse. Thus, this study was conducted in a mathematics education course at a large public university, in which the subjects were the pre-service secondary mathematics teachers enrolled for the academic semester. The intervention itself consisted of five 80-minute sessions, which was less than one fifth of the total class periods in the course. The purpose of this research has been to (1) determine if there was a change in pre-service teachers’ recognition of student arguments after the intervention, (2) determine if there was a change in pre-service teachers’ beliefs after the intervention and (3) determine if there were any connections between pre-service teachers’ solutions to problem-solving tasks and their recognition of student reasoning. A careful analysis was conducted on the pre- and post-assessment data and on the pre-service teachers’ written work to determine if the pre-service teachers showed any change in their ability to better analyze students’ reasoning, as well as if any change occurred in their beliefs. It was found that even a short intervention could influence the pre-service teachers’ ability to recognize student reasoning in both written work assessment and video assessments. Furthermore, the short intervention also resulted in data that indicates change in the pre-services teachers’ beliefs about student mathematics learning, mathematics, and mathematics teaching. Findings from this study indicate that an intervention that involves problem-solving, video analysis of students and analysis of student work can help improve pre-service teachers’ ability to better attend to student reasoning. This study also indicates that beliefs can change even over a short intervention. Further studies may evaluate the influence of different lengths of time for this type of intervention, as well as examine whether a replication of this study in other secondary pre-service class settings generates the same findings.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Mathematics education
• ISBN: 1321661452, 9781321661453