RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
PSTs’ Symbolic Forms During Mathematizing: The Case of Mia and Ava and the Laundry Task
Page: 161
This study investigates the symbolic forms pre-service teachers (PSTs) drew upon while mathematizing a real-world laundry task. Drawing from Sherin’s (2001) framework of symbolic forms we analyzed how two PSTs, Mia and Ava, coordinated mathematical symbols templates with conceptual reasoning to model when clothes should be washed based on bacterial load thresholds. Our analysis identifies both singleton forms: threshold and exponentially growing, and networks of forms: rate, contributing factors and exponential growth with a threshold. We end with implications for research on student cognition during modeling.