This article describes how to build a classroom community of learners, pre-service teachers, during the first days of the semester. This process not only creates a supportive learning environment, but it provides pre-service teachers with a model of how they can build a community of learners in their own classrooms.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics calls for students to see relationships and connections with mathematics (2000). This study examined the influences on eight pre-service elementary school teachers' beliefs and knowledge of teaching mathematics through literature. The semester long project involved both the language arts and…

In a geometry content course for pre-service elementary teachers, technology was utilized to assist students in making sense of shapes. They learned to write simple procedures in Logo that would program a turtle to draw various quadrilaterals. In the context of writing these procedures, the pre-service teachers used variables to represent the…

This descriptive study investigated preservice teachers' understanding of the properties and relationships among parallelograms. Forty preservice teachers in a pre-methods mathematics course for elementary education provided written descriptions of the terms rectangle and rhombus. These responses were sorted into categories according to…

Preservice elementary teachers have been shown to generally possess poor mathematical knowledge (e.g. Goulding, Rowland, & Barber, 2002) and also strong negative attitudes toward mathematics (e.g. MacNab & Payne, 2004). Recently, national organizations have proposed interventions to address these issues (Conference Board of the Mathematical…

A two year study investigating the state of pre-service teachers' (PTs') (n=224), teachers' (n=18) and students' knowledge (n=123) of Grade 7 geometry (using the van Hiele theory (1986) and acquisition scales of Gutierrez, Jaime & Fortuny (1991)) is reported. Results indicate that both teachers and PTs fail to reach the expected level of geometric…

The purpose of this research was to determine the pre-service primary mathematics teachers' competency of pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics. The data were collected by means of four open ended problems from the participation of 45 primary mathematics teacher candidates. Teacher candidates' responses were analyzed based on pre-determined…

Preservice elementary teachers need to be given the experiences of integrating mathematics with other subjects. They need to go into the classroom with the understanding that mathematics is not an isolated topic. This article describes a paper airplane activity that was presented in a class of preservice elementary education teachers to show how…

This paper examines the reality of teaching math in the rural southeast. Rural districts have low student expenditures and high transportation costs, due in part to the limited tax-base available. This leaves limited funds for technology. Universities prepare preservice teachers to teach math using the latest technology, however, many of these…

It is important for future teachers of mathematics to distinguish between technology as course content to be taught and technology as a teaching tool. This exploratory study examines prospective teachers' views of the role of technology in mathematics education before, during, and after their experience in a mathematics class that focused on…

A mediating approach is implemented into a section of Block I courses elementary pre-service teachers took in a cohort setting in Spring 2002. The paper discusses the components of the approach as well as the logistics of the initial implementation. Furthermore, the paper provides qualitative and quantitative analysis of a set of data gathered…

Faced with selecting a geometry curriculum for our preservice elementary teacher mathematics course, we used a mixed-methods study to investigate the effectiveness, with respect to student achievement and student perception, of three reform-oriented curricula. ANCOVA results indicate students using one of the curricula scored significantly higher…

Many teacher educators model constructivist pedagogy to preservice teachers in the mathematics classes they take. Preservice teachers however, are not necessarily comfortable being a part of such a class. The following qualitative case study examined the expectations and reactions of a group of preservice teachers who were taking their final…

This study describes a classroom action research activity regarding a group of elementary school teacher candidates' perceptions of good mathematics problems. A questionnaire containing 20 problems was given, and the candidates were asked to rate the quality of each problem on a 5-point scale. The results revealed that the majority of the teacher…

This article is about a computer lab project in which prospective teachers used Geometer's Sketchpad software to create two-dimensional nets for three-dimensional shapes. Since this software package does not contain ready-made tools for creating non-regular or regular polygons, the students used prior knowledge and geometric facts to create their…