Student teachers' participation in a research project in mathematics education

Teacher education is meant to be research based and many teacher educators try in different ways to achieve this aim also for the school practice during education. We report on an experiment to design a new form for inclusion of research during practice. A group of student teachers have during their fifth semester carried out interviews with pupils. The classroom observations and interviews take their starting point in data that have been collected in other parts of a larger ongoing research project. The students transcribe, analyse and report their results in written essays. We will describe the design, its results and evaluation. The theoretical framework used is the model for teacher competencies by Niss [1]. The research questions in the paper are (1) ‘In what ways is it meaningful to involve student teachers during practice in a research project?' and (2) ‘What kind of elements of learning do the students perceive in such a situation?'