Semantic structure and problem posing: Preservice teachers' experience

Despite problem posing's prominence in mathematics education research, its implementation in classrooms is limited. Therefore, teacher educators should incorporate problem posing tasks into preparation programs to help prospective teachers gain confidence in their abilities. One approach to teaching problem posing includes providing examples. The Common Core State Standards Initiative provides taxonomies with examples of one-step word problems for all four basic operations. Through this mixed-methods study, preservice teachers (N = 44) regularly identified and posed word problems within the addition and subtraction taxonomy. Before and after the intervention, the preservice teachers answered survey questions and posed problems to model given equations. The researchers analyzed the preservice teachers' abilities to pose logical word problems and to match given equations before and after instruction. They also quantitatively analyzed Likert-style survey responses on perceptions of posing the various types of word problems and integrated the results with a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses expanding on the same questions. Results showed participants' abilities to pose problems increased after the intervention. Additionally, participants felt problems with the unknown information at the beginning or middle were harder to pose than those with the unknown information at the end.