SECONDARY PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS’ INTERPRETATIVE KNOWLEDGE ON A MEASUREMENT SITUATION

With a focus on teachers’ perception about the area formula for a rectangle, we discuss components of the knowledge mobilized by prospective secondary teachers’ when answering a particular task aimed at accessing and developing their interpretative knowledge. In particular, we investigate the relationships between the focus of the prospective teachers’ content knowledge and their ability to expand their own space of solutions. Our findings reveal that the prospective secondary teachers seem to understand area as a surface measurement, but struggle to give meaning to the area formula of a rectangle when the reasoning involved differs from their own.