Developing student teachers' structural understanding of negative number arithmetic through the use of representations

Conference item

This paper describes three negative number representations explored by student teachers in a taught university session, examining how these representations can foreground curriculum-wide structures. Secondary mathematics student teachers were asked to script imagined classroom conversations before and after discussing a range of representations. The scripts showed variation in the extent to which the student teachers critically evaluated these representations and the connections they made to the underlying mathematical structures within, and beyond, negative number arithmetic.

Authors: Macmillan, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics
• Journal: Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 3
• Publication date: 2025-11-25
• Event title: 2025 Annual General Meeting of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics
• Event location: Norwich, UK
• Event website: https://bsrlm.org.uk/publications/proceedings-of-day-conference/ip45-3/
• Event start date: 2025-11-08
• Event end date: 2025-11-08
• ISSN: 2041-5788
• Language: English
• Keywords: initial teacher education (ITE); representations; negative numbers; structure