Over the past decade, there has been unprecedented regulation of initial teacher education (ITE). The objective of this study was to generate an in-depth understanding of the structural challenges faced by tertiary educators as they responded to a federal policy and a related state government policy in teacher education. The policies imposed on…

Fractions remains a difficult topic for primary preservice teachers (PST). This paper analyses a PST teaching episode using the "Refined Consensus Model" (RCM) of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) to explore challenges faced by PST in acquiring specialised knowledge for effective fractions teaching. Data include semi-structured…

We explored primary pre-service teachers' beliefs about challenging mathematical tasks and the role they perceived their initial teacher education played in influencing those aspects. Fifty-seven pre-service teachers completed an online questionnaire, and four participants were individually interviewed. Results showed that most participants…

Australian students' attitudes to mathematics are in decline relative to other countries. Their participation in senior secondary mathematics that provide pathways to further study is also falling. Pedagogical approaches that improve students' attitudes to mathematics and knowledge of mathematics are required. This paper reports on preservice…

The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers identify a range of supposedly demonstrable capabilities for graduate teachers. Elaborations privilege the realization of Standards through mentoring, and feedback from senior colleagues. As manifestations of the logic of neo-liberalism they operate as audit technologies for pre-service teachers…

Professional noticing of student thinking is considered a useful construct to investigate instructional decisions and activity made by teachers to support learning. This paper highlights the findings from one component of a multi-university (United States & Australia) research project focused on improving pre-service secondary mathematics…

This paper investigates the expectations that a group of preservice secondary mathematics teachers had for how students would approach four particular algebra problems. Their responses to a set of open-ended items were content analysed. Findings show that the teachers ranged in the expectations that they held for their students. Some teachers…

Examining critical incidents in the mathematics classroom is a useful way for pre-service teachers to understand the experience of teaching. This paper examines the development and trialling of variations of a novel affect-based critical moment protocol that enables preservice mathematics teachers to reflect on their teaching performance. The…

Despite the recognized importance of mathematical proof in secondary education, there is a limited but growing body of literature indicating how preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) view proof and the teaching of proof. The purpose of this survey research was to explore PSMTs' knowledge and beliefs about proof and proof teaching in…

Informed by teaching statistics across curriculum areas strategies, this study investigated the skills of 36 pre-service teachers (PSTs) who designed numeracy activities that focused on the statistics strand of the Australian curriculum. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the PSTs designed numeracy…

This qualitative survey study set out to investigate in-service and pre-service primary school teachers' perceived barriers to and enablers for the integration of children's literature in mathematics teaching and learning in an Australian educational context. While research over the past three decades have documented pedagogical benefits of…

This article reports on action research that was undertaken while teaching a mathematics education subject to a series of cohorts of final-year primary pre-service teachers at a university in Australia. My aim was to increase the understanding of an assessment task, as well as its intrinsic value. Each action research cycle involved the…

Structural thinking skills should be developed as a prerequisite for a young person's future mathematical understanding and a teachers' understanding of mathematical structure is necessary to develop students' structural thinking skills. In this study, three secondary mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs) learned to notice structural thinking…

This paper captures and reports on mathematics pre-service teacher (PST) voices. Mathematics PSTs, in a tertiary mathematics secondary curriculum teaching subject assessment, were asked to perform a small-scale literature review on an issue they identified as important in mathematics teaching. The assessment, written as an article, required…

This paper examines the mathematics content knowledge of graduate entry middle school mathematics pre-service teachers at the beginning (n=105; 80%) and end of a mathematics curriculum course. It was found that mathematics content knowledge at the commencement of the course was not strong. An intervention was designed to take account of content…