Coverage of topics during a mathematics pedagogy module for undergraduate pre-service primary teachers

Abstract

Recently, research on teacher preparation has begun examining the opportunities to learn that pre-service teachers have of the different forms of knowledge thought to be necessary for effective teaching. This paper reports on one component of a wider study of undergraduate pre-service specialist primary mathematics teacher preparation: the pre-service teachers’ opportunities to learn about the primary school mathematics curriculum during a final-year undergraduate module on mathematics pedagogy (MPM). Using data from observations of the complete teaching of this module at two university colleges in Saudi Arabia, the findings indicate that while the pre-service teachers had some opportunity to learn about teaching aspects of the primary school geometry curriculum, they had little or no opportunity to learn about teaching topics related to the algebra taught in the upper primary school years. The main reason for this discrepancy was that while the MPM contained some sessions on primary school geometry, there were no sessions explicitly related to primary school algebra even though the current version of the relevant primary school curriculum now includes some algebra for Grades 5 and 6 (pupils aged 10-12).

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ORCID for Keith Jones: orcid.org/0000-0003-3677-8802

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