A study on pre-service elementary mathematics teachers’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge regarding the multiplication and division of fractions

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2006
Işıksal, Mine
The purpose of this study was to examine pre-service mathematics teachers’ subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and the relationships between the two on multiplication and division of fractions. For this purpose, pre-service teachers’ understanding of key facts, concepts, principles, and proofs, their knowledge on common (mis)conceptions and difficulties held by the elementary students, their strategies of teaching these concepts, and representations they use to reason their understanding on multiplication and division of fractions were examined. Qualitative case study was performed where; data was collected from the pre-service teachers at the end of the spring semester of 2004-2005. Pre-service teachers were senior students enrolled in a teacher education program at a public university. Results revealed that pre-service teachers could easily symbolize and solve the basic questions on multiplication and division of fractions. However, in terms of pre-service teachers’ interpretation and reasoning of key facts and principles on multiplication and division of fractions, their subject matter knowledge could not be regarded as conceptually deep. Furthermore, although pre-service teachers have strong belief that they should teach multiplication and division of fractions conceptually, where the logical background of the operations is explained, they do not have sufficient knowledge to represent and explain these topics and relationships conceptually.

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Citation Formats
M. Işıksal, “A study on pre-service elementary mathematics teachers’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge regarding the multiplication and division of fractions,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2006.