Pre-service Teachers’ Emerging Understandings of Fraction Division with Remainders.
Location
Hamilton A
Proposal Track
Research Project
Session Format
Presentation
Abstract
The goal of this presentation is to communicate the results of a study that highlight the roles of pictorial representations and student-led learning in a discourse rich environment designed to encourage productive struggle, leading to deepening conceptual understandings of fraction division with remainders for pre-service teachers. Among the themes identified as a result of this study, we found that understanding of fraction division with remainders emerges in three levels.
Division by fractions is one of the most difficult and least understood topics in elementary mathematics (Bulgar, 2003; Flores, 2002). Many students learn this topic through the “inverting and multiplying” procedure without attributing much meaning to the procedure (Hanselman, 1997). Wheeldon (2008) concluded that pre-service teachers can build conceptual understanding of fractions by replacing traditional rote algorithms with modeling strategies. Additionally, discourse can lead students to actively construct meaning rather than passively consume teacher demonstrated procedures (Wachira, Pourdavood, & Skitzki, 2013). Numerous studies have found that teachers in the United States lack deep understandings of fraction division concepts (Ball, 1990; Ma, 1999; Li & Kulm, 2008; Nillas, 2003). However, only a few studies included how pre-service teachers make sense of the meaning of the remainder in fraction division (Olanoff, 2011).
Keywords
fractions, fraction division, pre-service teacher education, mathematics education, pictorial representation
Recommended Citation
Gault, Rebecca G., "Pre-service Teachers’ Emerging Understandings of Fraction Division with Remainders." (2017). Georgia Educational Research Association Conference. 30.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gera/2017/2017/30
Pre-service Teachers’ Emerging Understandings of Fraction Division with Remainders.
Hamilton A
The goal of this presentation is to communicate the results of a study that highlight the roles of pictorial representations and student-led learning in a discourse rich environment designed to encourage productive struggle, leading to deepening conceptual understandings of fraction division with remainders for pre-service teachers. Among the themes identified as a result of this study, we found that understanding of fraction division with remainders emerges in three levels.
Division by fractions is one of the most difficult and least understood topics in elementary mathematics (Bulgar, 2003; Flores, 2002). Many students learn this topic through the “inverting and multiplying” procedure without attributing much meaning to the procedure (Hanselman, 1997). Wheeldon (2008) concluded that pre-service teachers can build conceptual understanding of fractions by replacing traditional rote algorithms with modeling strategies. Additionally, discourse can lead students to actively construct meaning rather than passively consume teacher demonstrated procedures (Wachira, Pourdavood, & Skitzki, 2013). Numerous studies have found that teachers in the United States lack deep understandings of fraction division concepts (Ball, 1990; Ma, 1999; Li & Kulm, 2008; Nillas, 2003). However, only a few studies included how pre-service teachers make sense of the meaning of the remainder in fraction division (Olanoff, 2011).
