Understanding of inverse proportional reasoning in pre-service teachers

From an early age, understanding proportional reasoning is a fundamental pillar in mathematics education, and therefore, teachers should have a thorough knowledge of it. Despite its significance, there are few studies that analyse the difficulties that student teachers have in understanding proporti...

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Autores:
Cabero, Ismael
Santágueda-Villanueva, María
Villalobos-Antúnez, Jose Vicente
Roig, Ana Isabel
Tipo de recurso:
Article of journal
Fecha de publicación:
2020
Institución:
Corporación Universidad de la Costa
Repositorio:
REDICUC - Repositorio CUC
Idioma:
eng
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.cuc.edu.co:11323/7226
Acceso en línea:
https://hdl.handle.net/11323/7226
https://repositorio.cuc.edu.co/
Palabra clave:
Inverse proportionality
Problem-solving strategies
Intensive quantity
Extensive quantity
Proportional reasoning
Tabular and graphic representation
Pre-service teachers
Rights
openAccess
License
CC0 1.0 Universal
Description
Summary:From an early age, understanding proportional reasoning is a fundamental pillar in mathematics education, and therefore, teachers should have a thorough knowledge of it. Despite its significance, there are few studies that analyse the difficulties that student teachers have in understanding proportionality, and even less so inverse proportionality. We emphasised inverse missing-value problems by analysing them according to the type of unknown and the representation used. We checked which strategies they use to solve them and related them to other generic problems of proportional reasoning. For such purposes, we used a combined quantitative and qualitative empirical study applied to how pre-service teachers solve fifteen problems. The results show that the representations used in the statements aid their understanding and help solve the problems. Similarly, it is shown here that certain problem-solving strategies complicate proportional reasoning in pre-service teachers.