Vol. 30 No. 2 (2022)
Articles

Preservice Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Mathematical Tasks

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  • Bima Kumari Sapkota
Bima Kumari Sapkota
Purdue University

Published 2022-03-04

Keywords

  • task frameworks,
  • mathematical tasks,
  • preservice teachers,
  • task description

Copyright (c) 2022 Bima Kumari Sapkota

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This study reports how 12 secondary mathematics preservice teachers (M-PSTs) described characteristics of Mathematical Tasks after participating in instructional activities, including reading, reflecting, and discussing task characteristics from two mathematics task frameworks and related book chapters. The findings demonstrated that after engaging in these activities, M-PSTs used formal, research-informed language in a way that highlighted student-related factors (e.g., student prior knowledge) and contextual factors (e.g., class time constraints), suggesting that the language and concepts offered through the task frameworks initiated M-PSTs’ nuanced task descriptions. The implications of the instructional activities in teacher education programs to enhance M-PSTs’ conceptions of tasks are discussed.

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