PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Pre-Service Teachers’ Mathematical Understanding of the Area of a Rectangle
Page: 1574
This poster will share contrasting responses of two pre-service teachers (PTs) to problems that were part of an ongoing study of PTs’ conceptions of area of a rectangle. They were asked to a) find the area of a rectangle in terms of a non-square rectangular unit and relate that to multiplication, and b) interpret a fictional child’s attempt to connect the area formula with counting square units. These cases showed that an ability to explain a systematic covering of a 2D space with an area unit does not imply an ability to respond to a student who might think “the corner square gets counted twice”. Further, the ability to describe this structure, L rows with W area units per row, does not imply readiness to understand the area formula for a rectangle.