A case study on teacher instructional practices in mathematical modeling

Abstract

There is in fact a tendency in several countries to include more mathematical modeling in curriculums. Mathematical curriculum in Turkey focuses on the principle of “every child can learn mathematics”. From this perspective; more importance is given to modeling from the sixth grade to eighth grade mathematical curriculum. Accordingly, prospective mathematics teachers are required to be trained for preparing teaching environments appropriate for mathematical modeling. In this context, 33 prospective mathematics teachers are trained of mathematical modeling based teaching. 17 of them are selected randomly for modeling based teaching applications. Modeling based teaching carried out with modeling tasks developed by 17 prospective mathematics teachers at the end of training. This study is a case study of one of these 17 cases is selected for this study to provide descriptive information about instructional practices in mathematical modeling. Modeling task is applied on randomly selected 38 8th grade students in a practicing school. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools are used. The study presents information about instructional practices with data drawn from classroom observations and scoring rubrics.