Working with Real-World Data: A Pilot Study of Pre-Service Elementary Teachers

The purpose of this pilot study was to engage pre-service elementary teachers in a semester-long project to deepen their quantitative reasoning skills when working with real-world data. Over three semesters, all pre-service elementary teachers enrolled in mathematics content courses focusing on K-8 mathematics topics had to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret data. The data collected for this pilot study included all presentation slides, fieldnotes from observing their presentations, and the final papers. The analysis was two-fold: (1) Function language analysis, and (2) a grounded theory-inspired open coding. Results indicate that verb choice seems to make a difference in the tone and confidence of the written language and increased ownership seems to lead to stronger reasoning. The open coding and constant comparison of the data as an aggregate led to four potential challenges: (1) Avoidance of quantities, (2) only offering qualitative accounts, (3) graph choice purely based on preference, and (4) a lack of quantitative language.