Pre- and in-service teachers’ perceived value of an experimental real analysis course for teachers

ABSTRACT

Prospective secondary mathematics teachers are usually required to complete several university advanced mathematics courses before being certified to teach secondary mathematics. However, teachers usually do not find these courses to be valuable for their teaching. We designed an experimental real analysis course with the goal of making real analysis content useful and relevant to teaching. Our approach was to ground the real analysis content in pedagogical situations that problematized a secondary mathematics topic, where the nuances of teaching secondary mathematics could be informed by the real analysis that was covered. The experimental course was implemented in a graduate teacher education programme with 32 pre- and in-service teachers (PISTs). After the course, we conducted focus group interviews with 20 of these PISTs to get feedback on how the course was valuable to their teaching practice. Many PISTs found the course to be valuable for teaching secondary mathematics, as well as for their understanding of secondary mathematics and real analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• advanced mathematics
• content courses
• real analysis
• pre-service teachers
• in-service teachers

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under collaborative grants DUE 1524739, DUE 1524681, and DUE 1524619. Any opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Will McGuffey http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2423-8473

Notes

1. Although our course was in real analysis, the ‘real analysis’ component of the model can be replaced by any advanced mathematics content domain, such as abstract algebra or topology.

2. The excerpts that we provide as evidence for each category have been cleaned up for readability. In some cases, the provided excerpts include more than one analyzed statement to provide additional context for the reader.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Undergraduate Education: [grant number 1524619,1524681, 1524739].