Korean and Hong Kong Student Teachers’ Content Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics

The purpose of this study is to probe into student teachers’ understanding of mathematics content knowledge and to identify the features of knowledge which is required to be emphasized in the elementary teacher education. For this, student teachers attending teacher preparation courses in Korea and Hong Kong were interviewed on tasks encompassing the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ aspects of elementary mathematics. It was found that for the student teachers in the sample, their understanding of the concepts behind elementary mathematical topics was not very thorough. They were unable to retrieve the advanced mathematics that they learned in their advanced mathematics courses. It is suggested that for student teachers in mathematics, it is essential that the advanced mathematics they learn be explicitly related to the elementary mathematics they have learned in school.