Session Format
Presentation Session (45 minutes)
Target Audience
K12 Educators
Abstract for the conference program
Arithmetic properties (commutative, associative, distributive, identity, and inverse) provide one of the most critical avenues to higher-level thinking and conceptual understanding. The present study was designed to promote understanding and use of arithmetic properties among sixty-five pre-service teachers enrolled in two Foundations of Numbers and Operations classes. The intervention employed involved using various models to promote conceptual understanding of the arithmetic properties and use them as a problem-solving tool while identifying any possible misconceptions. A pretest-posttest design was employed. The results revealed that the intervention was effective in promoting understanding of the commutative, associative, identity, and inverse properties, and was somewhat effective in promoting understanding of the distributive property. The intervention also resulted in increasing participants’ confidence level for using arithmetic properties to use as a problem-solving tool and addressing misapplication of the properties.
The findings reveal that there is an urgent need for pre-service teacher training programs to focus on the content knowledge, and identifying the areas where content knowledge is lacking and needs to be improved. The methods and ideas presented in the study can be used by teacher educators to prepare pre-service teachers for effectively teaching these properties at schools.
Proposal Track
T1: Teaching and Learning in the STEM Field
Start Date
3-23-2018 11:30 AM
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Paliwal, Veena, "Fostering Pre-service Teachers' Understanding of Basic Arithmetic Principles" (2018). Interdisciplinary STEM Teaching & Learning Conference (2012-2019). 41.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/stem/2018/2018/41
Included in
Fostering Pre-service Teachers' Understanding of Basic Arithmetic Principles
Arithmetic properties (commutative, associative, distributive, identity, and inverse) provide one of the most critical avenues to higher-level thinking and conceptual understanding. The present study was designed to promote understanding and use of arithmetic properties among sixty-five pre-service teachers enrolled in two Foundations of Numbers and Operations classes. The intervention employed involved using various models to promote conceptual understanding of the arithmetic properties and use them as a problem-solving tool while identifying any possible misconceptions. A pretest-posttest design was employed. The results revealed that the intervention was effective in promoting understanding of the commutative, associative, identity, and inverse properties, and was somewhat effective in promoting understanding of the distributive property. The intervention also resulted in increasing participants’ confidence level for using arithmetic properties to use as a problem-solving tool and addressing misapplication of the properties.
The findings reveal that there is an urgent need for pre-service teacher training programs to focus on the content knowledge, and identifying the areas where content knowledge is lacking and needs to be improved. The methods and ideas presented in the study can be used by teacher educators to prepare pre-service teachers for effectively teaching these properties at schools.