Mathematical Modeling in Teacher Education

Abstract There are many ways to view the teaching and learning of mathematical modeling. In teacher education, the need to know mathematical modeling arises in part from the fact that mathematical modeling is mentioned in many secondary curricula around the world. Today there is an obvious need to understand how to teach and assess mathematics in a technology-enriched environment. At Goteborg University, prospective teachers took part in a course in which the mathematical content was designed to give them insight into how they could solve extended problems using mathematical modeling by drawing on technology and their background in mathematics. Different software and graphing calculators were used. A fundamental idea in the assessment of the students was that assessment and teaching were integrated. Because of our experiences in earlier studies of the teaching and learning of mathematical modeling (Lingefjard, 2000; Lingefjard and Holmquist, 2001), we decided to study whether the type of modeling process that students are involved in causes or at least plays a major role in the conceptions they develop. The formulation and presentation of mathematical modeling situations, the prospective teachers' views of mathematical modeling, their conceptions of the mathematics involved in the modeling process, including the possibility of validating a complicated mathematical model, are all discussed in this paper.