• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.269-284
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• 2013

The aim of this paper is to explore and understand, using in-depth interviews, the participant's motivation for becoming a math teacher, ways of dealing with university math knowledge and private tutoring experiences. In addition a larger aim is to understand how the individual's interest in mathematics and turing are linked to his/her larger personal tendencies contrasting secondary and university math learning. In-depth interviews were conducted with 6 pre-service teachers' subjective experiences focusing on motivation and feelings on mathematical knowledge and private tutoring. The output of this research consists of 3 cases, highlighting and conceptually developing the specific aspects under study; different ways in which individuals' involvement with the math learning and tutoring that might be connected with the ways of becoming teachers. Larger aspects of pre-service teachers' subjective experiences were sketched by contrasting the inner aspects of the individuals. Several suggestions were presented at the end with the possible research directions for math education.

• School Mathematics
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.97-111
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to examine a preservice elementary mathematics teacher's beliefs and stated-actions in which she planned and implemented mathematical activities in a field experience within a mathematics methods course. Results show that the preservice teacher seemed to be dealing with conflicts and trying to resolve them in order to make sense to herself. Results also suggest that the preservice teacher's beliefs about how children learn seem to get confirmed through the field experiences so that she was able to articulate, which influence her experience of focusing on an individual child. This, in turn, induces her to elaborate her beliefs. These processes would explain her beliefs and actions as a sensible system.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.389-403
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• 2020

This study aims to examine how information processing competency as one of the mathematical competencies has been interpreted and applied in mathematics education by analyzing tasks in middle school mathematics textbooks under the 2015 revised national curriculum. Based on the sub-elements of information processing competency organized by Park et al.(2015), we analyzed 191 tasks in 30 different middle school mathematics textbooks using descriptive statistics and ANOVA. Also, we investigated the meaning of information processing competency embedded in the tasks by distinguishing the characteristics of several different types of tasks. The results from this study showed that the number of tasks related to information processing competency in mathematics textbooks was too small and there was a huge difference across the textbooks in terms of the sub-elements. Even though there were four sub-elements of information processing competency, 'the use of manipulative and technological tools' was extremely dominant in the tasks in general. Even many of them used technology and manipulatives superficially. Furthermore, any textbook did not provide tasks dealing with all the four sub-elements. Such an unbalanced and fragmented approach to information processing competency could produce biased knowledge and insufficient experiences for information processing competency. It calls for further investigation and discussion about how to improve information processing competency in school mathematics.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.103-121
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• 2008

The primary purpose of this study was to gather knowledge about $5^{th},\;6^{th},\;and\;7^{th}$ graders' proportional reasoning ability by investigating their reactions and use of strategies when encounting proportional or nonproportional problems, and then to raise issues concerning instructional methods related to proportion. A descriptive study through pencil-and-paper tests was conducted. The tests consisted of 12 questions, which included 8 proportional questions and 4 nonproportional questions. The following conclusions were drawn from the results obtained in this study. First, for a deeper understanding of the ratio, textbooks should treat numerical comparison problems and qualitative prediction and comparison problems together with missing-value problems. Second, when solving missing-value problems, students correctly answered direct-proportion questions but failed to correctly answer inverse-proportion questions. This result highlights the need for a more intensive curriculum to handle inverse-proportion. In particular, students need to experience inverse-relationships more often. Third, qualitative reasoning tends to be a more general norm than quantitative reasoning. Moreover, the former could be the cornerstone of proportional reasoning, and for this reason, qualitative reasoning should be emphasized before proportional reasoning. Forth, when dealing with nonproportional problems about 34% of students made proportional errors because they focused on numerical structure instead of comprehending the overall relationship. In order to overcome such errors, qualitative reasoning should be emphasized. Before solving proportional problems, students must be enriched by experiences that include dealing with direct and inverse proportion problems as well as nonproportional situational problems. This will result in the ability to accurately recognize a proportional situation.