Teaching Elementary Pre-Service STEAM Teachers to Apply Computational Thinking to Mathematical Problem-Posing
Grace Pai, Michael Perrone · 2025
A strong foundation in mathematics is key to succeeding in any science, technology, engineering, arts/architecture, and mathematics (STEAM) field. To this end, the problems that teachers pose are one of the most important factors underlying the development of students’ mathematics knowledge. This study is novel in positing computational thinking (CT)—which is a set of cognitive practices and processes used in computer science—as a framework of strategies that can help pre-service teachers (PSTs) pose cognitively demanding tasks that develop their students’ mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills. Drawing on PSTs’ artifacts and reflections from an undergraduate mathematics methods course at a public, urban minority-serving institution, this chapter illustrates how CT practices like abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debugging can be applied to deepen mathematical problem-posing. We found three overarching ways that PSTs used CT to increase the cognitive demand of the original mathematics problems: (1) adding more applications of the same or different mathematical standard/skill, (2) asking students to engage in the mathematical practice of constructing arguments about the same standard/skill, and (3) providing opportunities for students to apply other mathematical practices.