Enhancing Prospective Teachers' Knowledge of Children's Conceptions: The Case of Division of Fractions

In this article I present and discuss an attempt to promote development of prospective elementary teachers' own subject-matter knowledge of division of fractions as well as their awareness of the nature and the likely sources of related common misconceptions held by children. My data indicate that before the mathematics methods course described here most participants knew how to divide fractions but could not explain the procedure. The prospective teachers were unaware of major sources of students' incorrect responses in this domain. One conclusion is that teacher education programs should attempt to familiarize prospective teachers with common, sometimes erroneous, cognitive processes used by students in dividing fractions and the effects of use of such processes.