Abstract
With the importance for teachers of understanding students’ strategies and providing appropriate feedback to their students, the purpose of this study is to analyze how prospective elementary teachers interpret and respond students’ strategies for fraction tasks with number lines. The findings from analysis of 64 prospective teachers’ responses were as follow. First, the prospective teachers in general could identify the students’ understanding and errors based on their strategies, however, some prospective teachers overgeneralized students’ mathematical thinking at a superficial level. Second, the prospective teachers could pose diverse tasks or activities for revising the students’ errors, while some prospective teachers tried to correct students’ errors by using only the area models. Based on these results, this study suggests for prospective teachers to have opportunities to understand elementary students’ diverse problem strategies and to consider teaching methods with different fraction models.
Figures & Tables
Figure 1.Fraction scheme thoery (Heckenberg et al., 2016; Tunç-Pekkan, 2015, pp. 422-423).