Secondary School Students’Attitudes towards the Concept of Equality and Preservice Teachers’ Professional Noticing

Abstract

With the understanding of importance of pedagogical content knowledge, professional noticing has become one of the research subjects of the mathematics educators for the last 10 years. This qualitative study which explores secondary school students’ solution processes regarding the concept of equation ,one of the main components of algebraic learning field and the pre-service teachers’ noticing about this is quite rich in terms of its results. The 6th, 7th, and 8th graders’ attitudes towards equations were revealed and it was found as stated in literature that students were dominantly “computational thinkers”. However, the differences in this general concept of thinking seem to make contribution to literature by involving discrete attitudes. In addition to this, the secondary findings of the study include some evidence revealing that pre-service teachers’ level of noticing accumulates at middle levels but they can be improved.