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Abstract: A pre-service teacher's Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and their personal constructs of teaching develop throughout their teacher education program. PCK integrates generic pedagogical knowledge, mathematical teaching methodology and knowledge of the discipline of mathematics and this paper reports on a survey that can be used to assess a pre-service teacher's PCK. TELPS (Teacher Education Lesson Plan Survey) was developed to determine the PCK of pre-service teachers during their teacher education program. TELPS is shown to analyse pre-service teachers' PCK with some indication that the pre-service teacher's development of PCK can be observed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Strengthening Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students' capabilities to implement challenging mathematical tasks is a focus for policy and curriculum internationally. In this article, we report on motivational aspects of ITE students' engagement with challenging mathematical tasks as an outcome of an explorative study involving 41 Australian ITE students in their third year of a four-year program. Data collection instruments consisted of pre- and post-surveys and a focus group interview. The study was interpretive, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Findings suggest ITE student motivation was most closely associated with situational interest and challenge served to both motivate and demotivate students. • Initial teacher education students need opportunities to engage with challenging mathematical tasks. • Motivational aspects of challenging mathematical tasks are an important consideration for task designers. • Primary initial teacher education students hold high expectations of success when engaging with challenging tasks. • Primary initial teacher education student motivation is closely associated with situational interest in the problem context. • Task challenge may serve to both motivate and demotivate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basis for individual students' instructional support by teachers is an individual diagnosis of one's learning advances and difficulties. Even though sophisticated diagnostic tools exist, it remains an open question how diagnosis and learning can be merged into a consistent pedagogical method to support both teachers and students with feedback about the learning process. Aspects like the usage of open format questions, social interdependencies and heterogeneity, group-forming processes and the teachers supervision issue are taken into account. We propose a model for integration of peer assessment functionality for learning into a computer-based Adaptive Diagnostic Learning Environment to solve central problems of classroom diagnostic assessment, adaptive learning and knowledge transfer between peers in a classroom environment. The research approach focused on math learning scenarios for evaluation, but is expected to be applicable for other educational content as well. In the following paragraphs we identify several problems in classroom scenarios to be addressed, describe the model of the underlying approach, show the implementation details and explain the evaluation setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]