Prospective teachers’ ability to teach early arithmetic skills - PROTEA

Arithmetic skills are foundational for young students’ future learning and their ability to function in society. The project’s overall objective is to develop prospective teachers’ ability to teach early arithmetic skills.

In the project, an intervention with four cohorts of prospective teachers at two higher education institutions is conducted to identify how prospective teachers’ teaching of early arithmetic can be developed by participation in a collaborative and theory-informed teaching design practice.

Moreover, how prospective teachers use theory, previous findings, and teaching practice when planning their teaching is also investigated. Learning study is the model used for the intervention.

It is an iterative collaborative model where groups of teachers or prospective teachers plan, enact, analyze and revise one lesson about a specific object of learning multiple times, and where a learning theory – variation theory – is used to inform the teaching.

Through the iterative model, the teachers obtain insights about teaching and what may be critical for students to discern in order to learn what is intended.

The project seeks to add new knowledge about how prospective teachers learn to teach using theory and insights from classroom practice.

Developing prospective teachers’ teaching about arithmetic is of the utmost importance since this will later affect young students’ learning in school.