Teachers’ Understanding of Generalizing and Justifying in a Professional Development Course

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Leonor
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Mata-Pereira, Joana, Ponte, João Pedro da, Oliveira, Hélia
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/59134
• topic: Mathematics; Reasoning; Generalizing; Justifying; Teacher education; Professional development

A teaching practice consistent with the development of students’ mathematical reasoning requires teachers to hold a profound understanding of mathematical reasoning. The aim of this research is to study the development of middle and secondary mathematics teachers’ understanding about the processes of generalizing and justifying in a professional development course. Data collection included observation of the course sessions, with video recordings, and document collection of teachers’ and their students’ productions. A qualitative in-depth analysis was carried out focusing on the ways and complexity of generalizing identified by the teachers. The results indicate that teachers progressively focus their attention on these reasoning processes, identifying and characterizing them. The way the course was designed and enacted appears to have contributed to enable the teachers to deepen their understanding of two central mathematical reasoning processes, generalizing and justifying, in addition to their ability to foster and identify such processes in the work with their students.