Justification in the mathematics classroom: A study of prospective elementary teachers

Abstract This study focuses on mathematical justification in the context of a mathematics course for prospective elementary teachers. The course was run as a whole-class constructivist teaching experiment. The analysis of the data provides a detailed look at how classroom norms for mathematical justification were established given the prospective teachers' traditional expectations of school mathematics and the teacher's reform-oriented notions. Three episodes from the class transcripts are analyzed in this article. They reveal the interactive process of negotiating new classroom norms for doing mathematics, the range of student responses to situations for justifications, and the complex interrelationship between the investigation of mathematical validity and development of mathematical understanding in the classroom community.

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