Diagnosing Mathematical Argumentation Skills: A Video-Based Simulation for Pre-Service Teachers

Mathematical argumentations and proofs cause difficulties for secondary school students (Healy and Hoyles, 2000). Teachers’ diagnostic skills are essential for adapting their teaching to students’ specific needs in order to facilitate students’ understanding of proofs (Südkamp and Praetorius, 2017). We developed a video-based simulation to investigate and promote pre-service teachers’ diagnostic skills. Participants encountered a diagnostic task with short, scripted video clips showing simulated students working on a geometry proof with a teacher. Observing student-teacher interactions served as the basis for the pre-service teacher participants’ diagnoses of students’ individual argumentation skills. This simulation is first used to investigate pre-service teachers’ diagnostic performance and the quality of their diagnoses and diagnostic processes. In a second step, the simulation will be expanded into a learning environment to investigate how pre-service teachers’ diagnostic skills can be supported through different kinds of scaffolds.