Fraction sense: an analysis of preservice mathematics teachers’ cognitive obstacles

Research on cognitive obstacles related to fraction sense in preservice mathematics teachers is significant, because their success depends on their skills. The acquisition of fraction sense is a complicated problem requiring a strategy to solve it. This study presents cognitive obstacles with fraction sense tests in preservice who will teach in secondary schools. It focuses on the following categories of cognitive obstacles: epistemological (language representation, tendency to generalise and rely on intuition) and didactic (less meaningful learning, and strategy). This paper takes a qualitative descriptive approach to examine 20 preservice mathematics teachers. The preservice teachers who encountered cognitive obstacles related to fraction sense testing were then grouped based on the similarity of their answers, and seven of them were selected to be interviewed. The research findings showed that five preservice teachers had overlapping obstacles: language representation and tendency to generalise; tendency to generalise and less meaningful learning; language representation, tendency to rely on intuition and trial and error strategy in; language representation and trial and error; and language representation and tendency to rely on intuition.