Teachers’ Interpretative Knowledge on Early Algebra

Starting from the assumption that very young children exhibit some naive forms of algebraic skills, in this paper we discuss some of our work aimed at inquiry, and in the same time develop, prospective primary teachers’ knowledge involved and required in recognize and interpret pupils’ early forms of algebraic thinking. The research dimension is perceived intertwined with teacher education and practice and thus, the tasks we develop for such work focus on early years’ prospective teachers’ mathematical knowledge specifically related with the work of teaching Early Algebra. Thus, our focus of attention concerns their knowledge that would sustain the work on supporting the development of pupils’ knowledge and reasoning toward more refined algebraic skills. We present promising preliminary results from an experiment conducted on 60 prospective Italian teachers’, which paves the way for further research about the expected early years teachers’ knowledge on Early Algebra and Algebra and even more refined didactic methods aimed at developing it.