Long-standing and ongoing calls exist for making mathematics meaningful, relevant, and applicable outside the classroom. Major mathematics education organizations (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics [NCSM], Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators [AMTE], TODOS: Mathematics for…

There are long-standing and ongoing calls for making mathematics meaningful, relevant, and applicable outside the classroom. In other words, to help students see mathematics as a tool for understanding, analyzing, and changing the world. However, there are also tensions between a focus on classical mathematics goals and a focus on analyzing and…

Increasingly, mathematics is being positioned as a tool to support students' understandings of social (in)justice and their own unique social positioning in the world. To this end, this study analyzes the impact of curricular reform efforts in an elementary mathematics content course. The course focused on fractions and statistics, and the course…

The purpose of this project was to understand how implicit views of authority support or limit prospective elementary teachers' (PTs) mathematical activity of justifying and to understand how the experience of justifying might support a development of an internal source of authority. In this case study of 18 PTs, we coordinate an analysis of (1)…

To allow prospective teachers to see mathematics as a useful tool to make sense of the world we redesigned a university mathematics content course for prospective elementary school teachers in the context of exploring income distribution in the United States. This allowed the prospective teachers to learn mathematics in a meaningful context and…

Prospective elementary school teachers (PTs) come to their mathematics courses fluent in using procedures for adding and subtracting multidigit whole numbers, but many are unaware of the essential features inherent in understanding the base-ten place-value system (i.e., grouping, place value, base). Understanding these features is crucial to…

Several researchers have documented prospective teachers' (PTs') conceptions of various mathematical topics. However, less is known about how PTs' conceptions develop. To address this gap, I designed two tasks with the goals of addressing the PTs' initial conceptions of multidigit whole numbers and helping them develop more sophisticated ones. I…

Elementary prospective school teachers (PSTs) often struggle to understand why they need to relearn the mathematics that they think they already know. In this set of replication studies, I address this struggle in 3 ways: First, by increasing and varying the participant pool, I replicate Thanheiser's (2009) study, which shows that PSTs do not yet…

Prospective elementary school teachers (PSTs) often do not perceive mathematics activities as fun or engaging and perceive the mathematics tasks in their university content courses as inauthentic and irrelevant. Both these points were addressed by connecting the university classroom tasks to the K-5 environment via a Family Math Night (FMN).…

Prospective teachers (PTs) need opportunities to develop fraction number sense, yet little research has explicated how this development occurs. Our research team collaboratively designed a task targeted at helping PTs develop fraction number sense through an exploration of fraction comparison strategies. This paper focuses on developing one…

Mathematical task design has been a central focus of the mathematics education research community over the last few years. In this study, six university teacher educators from six different US institutions formed a community of practice to explore key aspects of task design (planning, implementing, reflecting, and modifying) in the context of…

This case study of a PST's understanding of regrouping with multidigit whole numbers in base-10 and non-base-10 contexts shows that although she seems to have all the knowledge elements necessary to give a conceptually based explanation of regrouping in the context of 3-digit numbers, she is unable to do so. This inability may be due to a lack of…

Motivating prospective elementary school teachers (PTs) to learn mathematics in university mathematics content courses remains a constant challenge. While authentic tasks are readily available for students taking methods courses, which generally appear later in students' educational experience, authentic experiences for students enrolled in…

Prior research investigating PSTs' statistical thinking is sparse, yet teacher educators need to know how best to prepare future teachers for their work and given the increasing importance of STEM education we need teachers who are capable of preparing students at an early age to think about data. In this paper we share the results from a study…

This study was designed to investigate preservice elementary school teachers' (PSTs') responses to written standard place-value-operation tasks (addition and subtraction). Previous research established that PSTs can often perform but not explain algorithms and provided a four-category framework for PSTs' conceptions, two correct and two incorrect.…