Productive seeds in preservice teachers’ reasoning about fraction comparisons

Reasoning about fraction magnitude is an important topic in elementary mathematics because it lays the foundations for meaningful reasoning about fraction operations. Much of the research literature has reported deficits in preservice elementary teachers’ (PSTs) knowledge of fractions and has given little attention to the productive resources that PSTs bring to teacher education. We surveyed 26 PSTs using a set of 9 fraction-comparison tasks. We report the frequency of complete strategyarguments and the perspectives (ways of reasoning) used for each item. We further examine incomplete strategy-arguments, noting substantial evidence for productive seeds of reasoning. Using data from interviews with 10 of these PSTs, we identify evidence suggesting these seeds are, in fact, productive in that they provide foundations for further development. We argue that this type of research is needed in order to further mathematics teacher education.