DEVELOPMENT OF PRESERVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ REASONING ABOUT DISTRIBUTION

2024-5-14
Akar, Nazlı
The study aims to investigate the development of preservice mathematics teachers’ reasoning about distribution as they participated in the classroom teaching experiment based on Realistic Mathematics Education and enriched by dynamic statistics software. To this end, 12 compelling learning activities were implemented in the classroom teaching experiment with 14 preservice middle school mathematics teachers. The activities in the teaching experiment were designed to promote classroom discussion and collaboration. The study’s data comprised the pretest, posttest, semi-structured interviews, video recordings of classroom and debriefing sessions, the participants’ written artifacts, and field notes. Qualitative methods were employed to analyze the data. The findings revealed that the preservice mathematics teachers’ reasoning levels improved considerably in reasoning about statistical measures, data representations, shape and shifts in data, and proportional reasoning after the teaching experiment. Classroom statistical practices emerging from taken-as-shared ideas based on communal reasoning in the classroom showed how the preservice mathematics teachers reasoned throughout the teaching experiment enriched by dynamic statistical software. This study indicated that classroom teaching that gradually progressed by making sense of central tendency and variability, interpreting density in the data, and reasoning about the shape of the distribution in an integrated manner in the social learning environment contributed to the improvement of preservice mathematics teachers’ reasoning about distribution. In that respect, the study has valuable implications for teacher education in developing preservice mathematics teachers’ reasoning about distribution.
Citation Formats
N. Akar, “DEVELOPMENT OF PRESERVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ REASONING ABOUT DISTRIBUTION,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2024.