PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Secondary teachers’ responses to embedded mathematical uncertainty: Cases from an assessment item on exponents
Page: 228
A growing body of research recognizes uncertainty as an inevitable part of teaching. Yet still little has attended to the potential of uncertainty as a space for mathematics teacher education. In this paper, we report on an analysis of interview data in which secondary teachers were asked to think aloud as they solved a task with embedded uncertainty. We present examples of teacher responses and discuss ways in which they assign valence to their experience of uncertainty. We found that teachers do not always engage with mathematical uncertainty, but also that their (dis)engagement did not necessarily signal their ability to reach the intended answer, and was not always predicted by the valence they assigned the uncertainty. These results suggest that, while tasks containing embedded uncertainty may be rich sources to draw on, facilitating the resulting discussions is likely to be complicated and needs to account for a number of factors.