Primary trainee teachers’ knowledge of parallelograms

Description/Abstract

Considerable research has indicated that amongst the factors which make the most significant contribution to high student achievement in mathematics is secure subject knowledge on the part of the teacher as this underpins an approach to mathematics in which topics are seen as part of a coherent set of related ideas, with clear progression and links to previous and future learning. This paper reports part of the findings from a study of trainee teachers’ knowledge of basic geometrical figures, in particular focusing on what knowledge they have of parallelograms and how they use this knowledge to solve geometrical problems. The findings indicate that only a minority of trainee primary teacher have a fully sophisticated knowledge of parallelograms and of how to use the properties of parallelograms to solve relevant problems.