Beginning Pre-service Teachers’ Approaches to Teaching the Area Concept: identifying tendencies towards realistic, structuralist, mechanist or empiricist mathematics education

Abstract

SUMMARY This study, on approaches to mathematics education, aims to identify curricular frameworks that are robust across cultures and education systems. Lesson ideas of Irish and Dutch pre-service teachers were studied to identify the selections of: (1) the basic aspects of the concept of area; and (2) the real-life contexts, shapes, and manipulatives chosen to teach this concept. A two-dimensional framework emerged, relating preservice teachers’ ideas to archetypal realistic, structuralist, mechanist, or empiricist approaches.