Examining pre-service mathematics teachers’ use of technology from a sociomathematical norm perspective

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how pre-service mathematics teachers integrate technology into their classroom practices, which normative behaviour they formulate in the classroom and the relationship between such behaviour and the integration process of technology. The study integrates two frameworks, the Instrumental Orchestration and Sociomathematical Norms (SMNs), to examine technology-enhanced classrooms’ micro-cultures. We observed two pre-service mathematics teachers who were the participants of a four-month teacher preparation programme regarding how effectively they used technological tools in line with their endorsed SMNs utilizing a multiple holistic case study. We analysed the data considering eight instrumental orchestration types and six SMNs (three of which emerged from the data). The results indicate a relation between how effectively the pre-service teachers used technological tools in their teaching and whether their endorsed SMNs have a mathematical basis. Although the two pre-service mathematics teachers used the same instrumental orchestration types, the variety of SMNs they endorsed indicated successful technology integration. By integrating an SMN perspective into the instrumental orchestration framework, the study gives researchers and teacher educators insights into the context of the socio-cultural aspect of technology integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Instrumental orchestration
• pre-service mathematics teachers
• sociomathematical norms
• teaching mathematics with technology

2010 MATHEMATIC SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODE:

• 97U99

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grants from BIDEB-The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Also, this study is a part of the first author's master thesis submitted to Institute of Educational Sciences, Marmara University. We would like to thank John Monaghan for his valuable comments on the initial version of this manuscript. Some of the findings of this study were presented at the 9th Congress of European Research in Mathematics Education, Prague, Czech Republic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 During the data analysis process, we added three SMNs that emerged from the data to these SMNs. Finally, we constructed a list of SMNs, as shown in Table 2, where we marked the new SMNs with an asterisk.

2 We considered the numbering of students in each participant's excerpts separately.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.