PROSPECTIVE ELEMENTARY TEACHERS' CONCEPTIONS OF FRACTIONAL UNITS

In order to design effective materials for use with prospective elementary teachers we need to a more fine-grained analysis of their conceptual understandings. The research study reported here is aimed at doing this in the area of number and operation. Sixteen prospective teachers (PTs) of varied mathematics backgrounds participated in four one-hour interviews. The subset of tasks discussed here focus on PTs' understanding of fractions. The data reveals not only varying levels of understanding of basic fraction concepts, but also highlights the impact of contextual features and general approaches to solving problems on PTs' performance, and help identify fraction tasks that are more powerful in illuminating conceptual weaknesses.