Pre-Service Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Understanding of Students’ Knowledge: Location of Decimal Numbers on a Number Line
Abstract
Studies reveal that students as well as teachers have difficulties in understanding and learning of decimals. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ as well as pre-service teachers’ solution strategies when solving a question that involves an estimation task for the value of a decimal number on the number line. We also examined the pre-service teachers’ anticipation of students’ misconceptions and difficulties for the given task. To conduct our analysis, we conducted interviews with three 5th and three 6th grade students, and eight pre-service teachers. During the interviews we asked them to solve the question and explain their solution strategies. The findings of the study indicate that students and pre-service approach this problem in different ways. However, both groups have a tendency to think of decimals successively and indicate precise answers rather than specifying a range of possible values. We also observed the pre-service teachers could only partially anticipate the misconceptions and difficulties faced by the students.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Authors alone are responsible for the contents of their articles. The journal owns the copyright of the articles. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of the research material.
The author(s) of a manuscript agree that if the manuscript is accepted for publication in the journal, the published article will be copyrighted using a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license. This license allows others to freely copy, distribute, and display the copyrighted work, and derivative works based upon it, under certain specified conditions.
Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to include any images or artwork for which they do not hold copyright in their articles, or to adapt any such images or artwork for inclusion in their articles. The copyright holder must be made explicitly aware that the image(s) or artwork will be made freely available online as part of the article under a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
