Matematikklærerstudenters matematiske ‘meaning’ om endringsrate : En norsk pilotstudie om bruken av et instrument utviklet i USA designet for å utforske læreres matematiske ‘meanings’
Master thesis
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2455728Utgivelsesdato
2017Metadata
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Sammendrag
The theme for this masters dissertation is mathematics teacher education students’ mathematical meaning of rate of change. It is a pilot study that uses the research instrument Mathematical Meanings for Teaching secondary mathematics (MMTsm) in Norway. The instrument is developed in the USA by Professor Pat Thompson at Arizona State University. It is a diagnostic instrument designed to investigate teachers’ mathematical meanings and it is developed from a constructivist perspective. In the work for this dissertation I have focused on the subject ‘rate of change’, that is the subject of several of the tasks included in the MMTsm instrument. Also in the work for this dissertation the instrument has been translated from English to Norwegian, the report includes a reflection on this translation process. In this dissertation, I address the research question “What does the MMTsm instrument expose when it is used to investigate Norwegian mathematics teacher education students’ mathematical ‘meaning’ about rate of change?” Through the Norwegian text the English word ‘meaning’ is used, ‘meaning’ may be very briefly explained as the application of cognitive schema expressed through students responses to the tasks set.
27 mathematics teacher education students from three universities in Norway engaged with the Norwegian version of the MMTsm instrument. To be able to say something about their meanings expressed in the individual tasks I developed an analysis tool based on the scoring rubric designed by Professor Thompson. The analysis tool is a concept map that contains important concepts connected to rate of change, and which has been color coded in relation to the answers students gave. With help of this analysis tool I have searched to see what the instrument exposes about these students mathematical meanings about rate of change.
The results indicate that several of these students express poorly developed meanings about the concepts related to rate of change. Amongst these, there were very few who expressed a good productive and consistent meaning across all the tasks connected to the concepts “The relationship between distance and time”, “Average speed” and “Constant speed”.
All the students included in the study had passed university mathematics courses accumulating at least 60 ECTS points. One might conclude that they have attained a satisfactory functional understanding of higher level mathematics. However, the inconsistencies expressed in their responses to the tasks raise questions about their readiness to teach the subject in a clear and unambiguous manner, thus raising questions about the adequacy of mathematical studies on teacher education programmes
Beskrivelse
Masteroppgave matematikkdidaktikk MA502 – Universitetet i Agder 2017