Abstract
This study, conducted in the United States, was designed to assess the extent to which the beliefs, “multiplication always makes bigger” and “division always makes smaller,” are explicitly held by preservice elementary teachers. Paper and pencil instruments were administered to 136 preservice elementary teachers in a large university in the southeastern United States. Responses on the instruments and in interviews provide insight into the sources of preservice teachers' beliefs and into the relationship among preservice teachers' beliefs, computational skills, and performance on word problems.
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Tirosh, D., Graeber, A.O. Preservice elementary teachers' explicit beliefs about multiplication and division. Educational Studies in Mathematics 20, 79–96 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00356042
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00356042