Didactic-Mathematical Knowledge of Prospective Primary School Teachers to Teach Probability
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/rpe.39849Keywords:
Probability, Didactic-Mathematical Knowledge, Prospective teachers, Primary Education, AssessmentAbstract
The training of primary school teachers in probability is essential to develop an early understanding of probabilistic concepts in their students. The aim of this paper is to assess the didactic-mathematical knowledge to teach probability of Spanish prospective primary school teachers. To achieve this, 156 prospective teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire with three tasks, each with four sections. The first one involves solving and justifying the task and assesses common knowledge of probability; the second section requires identifying the mathematical objects involved in the solution and assesses the epistemic facet of didactic knowledge; the third requires discriminating the correct and incorrect answers to the task by fictitious students, thus analysing the cognitive facet; and the fourth consists of suggesting actions to overcome the students' errors, thus assessing the mediational and interactional facets. Participants demonstrated good common content knowledge and correctly identified the correct and incorrect answers of the fictitious students. Performance in identifying mathematical objects, explaining students' errors and suggesting didactic actions was lower. These results suggest areas that need to be strengthened in the training of primary school teachers to teach probability.
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