Investigating Preservice Teachers’ Interpretations and Discussion of Real-Life Examples: Focusing on the Use of Percent

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the characteristics of PSTs’ selection of real-life examples for discussion, the aspects they attended to during the discussion, and their reflection on facilitating the discussion. A total of 46 elementary PSTs in the US joined in the study. We gathered data from a three-phase task using an online course management platform and restricted the real-life contexts using percent. The collected data were analyzed using enumerative and ethnographic content analysis. The findings revealed that while we detected some shifting features in PSTs’ selection of real-life contexts compared to prior studies, we found their static preference of contexts around consumer practices over others (e.g., contexts related to science and critical literacy). The findings also revealed that PSTs tended to pay attention to the contexts with critical views when the context was not straightforward and direct computations were not readily feasible to get the final answer. Moreover, the vague contexts helped encourage PSTs to view the situations critically, but they had difficulties having meaningful mathematical discussions in such contexts. We provided suggestions and implications for future research based on these findings.