PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
On The Role of Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teachers’ Understanding of Commutativity and Associativity
Page: 2-32
The purpose of this study is to investigate a relationship between mathematical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge of content and students (Hill, Ball, & Shilling, 2008), in the context of algebra. As participants in a paired teaching experiment, mathematics education doctoral students revealed their understandings of commutativity and associativity (cf. Larsen, 2010). Although the participants’ knowledge of children’s initial understandings of algebra and familiarity with mathematics education literature influenced their own mathematics reasoning, the difficulties they encountered were similar to those of undergraduates without such pedagogical content knowledge.