PROSPECTIVE MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ BELIEFS AND TPACK FOR TEACHING STATISTICS

The development of technology (in particular, educational technology) led to important changes in Statistics education and challenge teachers to create more active, technology-supported learning environments. Recognizing that a successfully implementation of the necessary changes in the teaching that will enable statistics education to reap the full benefits of emerging technologies depend on mathematics teachers’ knowledge to effectively use them in classrooms, pre-service teacher education needs to be examined [1].

Teacher’s knowledge for teaching has been a concern for teacher educators and a focus of extensive research, particularly since Shulman [2] conceptualized “Pedagogical Content Knowledge” as a special combination of content and pedagogy that is specific for a given content area. Subsequent research adopts and expands Shulman’s ideas in different models for teacher knowledge to teach specific subjects. Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, developed by Mishra and Koehler [3], has become central to research into teacher education in many different disciplines, including mathematics [4]. It is based upon the premise that effective technology integration for pedagogy around specific subject matter requires developing understanding of the dynamic relationship between three primary forms of knowledge: technology, pedagogy, and content. Despite the extended research done in the areas mentioned, the current literature does not offer much insight on how do prospective teachers connect their content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and technology knowledge to prepare proposals for teaching statistics with the help of technology.

This paper reports on a study aiming to analyse a group of eight prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ beliefs about the use of technology in mathematics teaching and their technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) for teaching Statistics after an instructional intervention that took place within an undergraduate mathematics methods course. As educators, we aimed at promoting, while at the same time investigating, participants’ knowledge to productively select and integrate educational technology in their future practice. This knowledge is analysed using TPACK framework and the assessment instrument developed by Schmidt and colleagues [5]. Data consists of participants’ written work and transcripts of whole class discussions of statistical tasks with educational software, lesson plans for teaching statistics with technology and their final reflections on the work carried out during the instructional intervention.

The qualitative analysis of the data is currently in progress, but preliminary results shows the potential of TPACK framework adopted to provide useful information about prospective teachers developing vision of what it means to teach Statistics with technology and that their beliefs about teaching and learning appear to shape their decisions about educational technology used in the classroom. It also allows us to identify some TPACK components as needing further attention in teacher education.