Qualified Mathematics Teachers' Knowledge of Place Value Concept

Zembat, I.Ö. , Yasa, S.A. and Aslan, M. (2021) Qualified Mathematics Teachers' Knowledge of Place Value Concept. British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSLRM) Autumn Day Conference, 06 Nov 2021.

Abstract

Place value is an important concept that cut across primary and secondary curriculum universally. Teachers need to understand this concept in more advanced ways than their students to teach it effectively. Knowing about the nature of teachers' understanding of place value is essential as it may give educators opportunities to develop well-designed professional development programmes. However, qualified teachers' knowledge of place value has not been extensively investigated in the mathematics education research arena. We propose sharing the initial results of a research study about 40 qualified teachers' knowledge of place value using the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching framework as a guide for this research session. The teachers who took part in the study have a range of experience (3-45 years) and currently teach grades 1-8 (age 6-14) in the central region of Turkey. We collected the data via videotaping of one-on-one semi-structured interviews. We gave the participants five different scenarios about alternative student solutions in the context of arithmetic operations and asked them to analyse those. We are in the process of qualitatively analysing the data. Our initial observations suggest that teachers with weak and procedurally oriented knowledge are inclined to draw on pedagogical content knowledge when they feel insecure about analysing the given scenarios with specialised content knowledge.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Zembat, Dr Ismail Özgür
• Authors: Zembat, I.Ö., Yasa, S.A., and Aslan, M.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Education > Pedagogy, Praxis & Faith