• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.329-350
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• 2019

Productive struggle is a student's persevering effort to understand mathematical concepts and solve challenging problems that are not easily solved, but the problem can lead to curiosity. Productive struggle is a key component of students' learning mathematics with a conceptual understanding, and supporting it in learning mathematics is one of the most effective mathematics teaching practices. In comparison to research on students' productive struggles, there is little research on preservice mathematics teachers' productive struggles. Thus, this study focused on the productive struggles that preservice mathematics teachers face in solving a non-routine mathematics problem. Polya's four-step problem-solving process was used to analyze the collected data. Examples of preservice teachers' productive struggles were analyzed in terms of each stage of the problem-solving process. The analysis showed that limited prior knowledge of the preservice teachers caused productive struggle in the stages of understanding, planning, and carrying out, and it had a significant influence on the problem-solving process overall. Moreover, preservice teachers' experiences of the pleasure of learning by going through productive struggle in solving problems encouraged them to support the use of productive struggle for effective mathematics learning for students, in the future. Therefore, the study's results are expected to help preservice teachers develop their professional expertise by taking the opportunity to engage in learning mathematics through productive struggle.