PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
Assessing Pre-Service Teachers’ Conceptual Understanding of Mathematics Using Praxis II Data
Page: 2-590
We summarize the preliminary results of a study of conceptual understanding of mathematics by pre-service secondary school math teachers. Our research involves the statistical analysis of data from an actual mathematics Praxis II licensure exam, which was administered nationwide. Through a quantitative, item by item analysis, using a classification of these test items by conceptual difficulty, we obtain insight into the conceptual issues that pre-service teachers have great difficulty with. Our preliminary results show a significant gap between computational and abstract mathematical processes. This in turn, affects the ability of pre- service teachers to be fluent in the domains of both subject and pedagogical content knowledge.