Prospective Teachers’ Pedagogical Considerations of Mathematical Connections: A Framework to Motivate Attention to and Awareness of Connections

Research findings and reform-oriented standards emphasise the importance of mathematical connections in support of students’ conceptual development. Previous research on teachers attending to mathematical connections has tended to focus on expert teachers’ practice. Complementing previous research, this study describes how a cohort of twelve prospective mathematics teachers attended to and made sense of mathematical connections that arose when working with secondary students in small-group instruction. Results indicated prospective teachers were able to attend to mathematical connections during instruction and made several pedagogical considerations around such connections. We present a framework, the Pedagogical Considerations of Mathematical Connections (PCMC) framework, which offers mathematics teacher educators a new model to expand prospective teachers’ attention to and awareness of mathematical connections. The study contributes to the existing literature on teacher noticing by providing a new kind of theme-specific noticing (i.e., mathematical connections) and informing mathematics teacher educators of how prospective secondary teachers attend to mathematical connections.