Weaknesses in Preservice Teacher’s Computational Skills and Understandings

In this session, Dr. Cheng-Yao Lin and Dr. Jerry Becker will discuss weaknesses they have found in preservice teacher’s computational skills and understanding. To assess students’ computational skills, they administered pretests the first day of class on the basic addition facts, multiplication facts and computational facility on the whole numbers, fractions, decimals and integers. The results they found were astonishing and worse than ever before, and they have found that they get worse each succeeding semester.

Dr. Lin and Dr. Becker are both professors of mathematics education at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.