Recognizing the need for U.S. students' mathematics learning to be built on a
solid foundation of conceptual understanding, professional organizations such as the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2000) and the Conference Board of the
Mathematical Sciences (2001) have called for an increased focus on building conceptual
understanding in elementary mathematics in several domains. This study focuses on an
exploration of two aspects of Hill, Schilling, and Ball's (2004) mathematics knowledge
for teaching: specialized content knowledge (SCK) and knowledge of content and
students (KCS) related to fractions concepts, an area that is particularly challenging at
the elementary level and builds the foundation for understanding more complex rational
number concepts in the middle grades. Eight grades early childhood through four
preservice teachers enrolled in a mathematics methods course were asked to create
concept maps to describe their knowledge of fractions and interpret student work with
fractions. Results showed the preservice teachers to be most familiar with the part-whole
representation of fractions. Study participants were least familiar with other fraction
representations, including fractions as a ratio, as an operator, as a point on a number line,
and as a form of division. The ratio interpretation of a fraction presented the greatest
difficulty for study participants when asked to describe student misconceptions and
create instructional representations to change students' thinking.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/86023 |
| Date | 10 October 2008 |
| Creators | Wright, Kimberly Boddie |
| Contributors | Goldsby, Dianne S., Ly, Yeping |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, born digital |
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