This study, using a scriptwriting task, examines how 52 Czech pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) handled a situation in which a fictional pupil's incorrect reasoning resulted in a correct answer. The participants were asked to imagine and provide a script that reflects how the situation could evolve in response to the pupil's incorrect…

This paper reports on concept images of 38 secondary school mathematics prospective teachers, regarding the evenness of numbers. Written assignments, individual interviews, and lesson transcripts uncover salient, erroneous concept images of even numbers as numbers that are two times "something" (i.e., "2i" is an even number),…

Teachers' ability to accurately judge difficulties of mathematical tasks is an essential aspect of their diagnostic competencies. Although research has suggested that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is positively correlated with the accuracy of diagnostic judgments, experimental studies have not been conducted to investigate how PCK affects…

We present two empirical studies with 241 and 211 pre-service teachers that evaluate the explanatory power of word order matching and static comparison as models for the reversal error. We used tasks consisting of generating an algebraic equation representing a comparison given in a verbal statement. We introduce the types of magnitude involved in…

An empirical study has been carried out to evaluate the potential of word order matching and static comparison as explanatory models of reversal error. Data was collected from 214 undergraduate students who translated a set of additive and multiplicative comparisons expressed in Spanish into algebraic language. In these multiplicative comparisons…

Interpreting and responding to student thinking are central tasks of reform-minded mathematics teaching. This study examined preservice teachers' (PSTs) interpretations of and responses to a student's error(s) involving finding a missing length in similar rectangles through a teaching scenario task. Fifty-seven PSTs' responses were…