The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that by learning the place-value method of teaching long division, prospective elementary school teachers will both gain an understanding of and improve their teaching of long division. / In the early Sixties, the mathematical content of prospective elementary school teachers' programs was the focus of attention of many mathematics educators. / Noting some dissatisfaction of the results of this effort, and claiming that elementary teachers tend to teach as they have been taught, some mathematics educators in the Seventies have advocated and experimented with the notion that the pedagogical content should not be isolated from mathematical theory. In trying to develop mathematical understanding of long division through a study of its pedagogy, the present study essentially agrees with this point of view. This effort evolved gradually from four previous studies at The Florida State University, which dealt with the subject matters of numeration systems, geometry, or probability. / At the same time, long division has been one of the most troublesome topics for elementary students to master. Since the Fifties a repeated subtraction technique has been emphasized, based upon a study by Van Engen and Gibb in 1956. Since 1970, emphasis has been shifting toward use of a multiplicative, distributive, or partitioning approach. The long division technique of the present study is in the spirit of the latter, using money as a concrete model, and emphasizing an understanding of the process in terms of place-value and distributivity. / Twenty-one prospective elementary school teachers at The Florida State University were the subjects of this study. Ten of them were chosen, each to teach long division to one of 10 randomly-selected fifth-graders from the University's Developmental Research School (DRS). These teaching sessions were videotaped. All 21 prospective teachers were then taught the place-value method of teaching long division, following which they took a revised form of Van Engen and Gibb's examination as a test of their understanding. The same 10 prospective teachers taught long division, again each to one of another group of 10 randomly-selected DRS fifth-graders. Once more these teaching sessions were videotaped. All videotapes were evaluated by three mathematics education doctoral students, using a revised form of three observation instruments developed by Dodd (Thornton) in 1974. / The data indicated that learning the place-value technique for teaching long division can favorably affect the mathematical understanding and teaching performance of prospective elementary school teachers. As a result of studying this technique not only did the 21 prospective elementary school teachers display comprehension on the mathematical understanding test, but also the videotaped microteaching was judged significantly better after the instruction than before. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2547. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74493 |
| Contributors | SALAMA, HASSAN ALI., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 193 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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