Pre-service Secondary Mathematics Teachers Making Sense of Definitions of Functions

Source: Mathematics Teacher Education and Development, Vol 14, No. 1, 2012.

This article reports on a qualitative study of pre-service secondary mathematics teachers choosing, using, evaluating, and interpreting definitions.

In an undergraduate capstone course for mathematics majors, these future teachers were assigned three tasks which required them to (1) choose and apply definitions of functions, (2) evaluate the equivalence of definitions of functions, and (3) interpret and critique a secondary school textbook’s definition of a specific type of function.

Their performances indicated that many of these pre-service mathematics teachers had deficiencies reasoning with and about mathematical definitions.