Source: Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 17(4), 440-457, (2017).
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This article aims to present an approach for incorporating technology into a mathematics methods course that utilizes several types of technology into one lesson.
Methods
The participants were preservice teachers enrolled to an undergraduate mathematics education course for middle school and high school mathematics teachers at a large southeastern university.
They participated in a multitechnology-enabled lesson which was supposed to help them developing their technological pedagogical statistical knowledge. The lesson engaged the participants in a statistics lesson aimed at developing their reasoning about the measurement units of data and then engages them in reasoning about students’ approaches to the task.
Findings
The findings reveal that several participants noted that sixth graders used strategies similar to their own.
However, the participants were surprised that sixth graders had reasoned in a way that they had not.
The findings demonstrate that the students’ reasoning and approaches to the Mislabeled Variables task fostered the preservice teachers further development of technological pedagogical statistical knowledge. For example, the participants employed different ways of reasoning, such as data as a pointer, case-value, classifier, and aggregate.
In drawing conclusions about the context of the data, the participants utilized a variety of approaches, including case-value and classifier. However, they also used a different type of reasoning – the type of number (e.g., rational or whole number) – to reason about how such a number would make sense as a measurement of the context of a source of data.