PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Conventions or Constraints? Pre-service and In-service Teachers’ Understandings
Page: 87
We draw on data from pre-service (PST) and in-service (IST) teachers to characterize relationships between what we perceive to be conventions common to U.S. school mathematics and individuals’ meanings for graphs and related topics. We use PST responses during clinical interviews to illustrate three themes: (a) some PST responses implied that things we perceive to be conventions were instead inherent aspects of PSTs’ meanings (habitual use of “conventions”); (b) some PST responses implied they understood certain practices as customary choices not necessary to represent particular mathematical ideas (conventions qua conventions); and (c) some PST responses exhibited what we perceive to be contradictory actions and claims. We then focus on data collected with ISTs against the backdrop of these themes to highlight similarities across these populations and to provide implications of our findings.