Using Concept Cartoons to Investigate Future Primary School Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge on Addition

This paper introduces an exploratory empirical qualitative study that has been carried out with two diverse groups of future primary school teachers (before vs after the attendance of a course on didactics of mathematics). The study uses an educational tool called Concept Cartoons accompanied by a set of six indicative questions as a means of collecting data on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in mathematics. In particular, the study focuses on future teachers’ written responses to virtual pupils’ opinions in a virtual classroom situation related to the algorithm of written addition of natural numbers. The findings reveal ten different code categories of displays of PCK related to knowledge of pupils (three categories), knowledge of tasks (one category) and knowledge of instruction (six categories), some of them related to strong PCK, others to weak PCK. According to the findings, all the categories related to knowledge of pupils occurred in the post-didactic group only, all the categories that appeared only in the pre-didactic group are connected to weak PCK, and all the categories that occurred only in the post-didactic group are connected to strong PCK.