Pre-Service STEM Majors Understanding of Slope According to Common Core Mathematics Standards: An Exploratory Study

Common Core Mathematics Standards (CCMS) is a major effort at revamping the U.S. K-12 mathematics education in order to improve American students’ mathematical performance and international competitiveness. To ensure the successful implementation of CCMS, there have been calls for both recruiting from those with the strongest quantitative backgrounds (e.g., STEM majors) and offering rigorous mathematics training in teacher preparation. Missing from the literature are questions of whether STEM majors who arguably represent the strongest candidates for the teaching force have the depth of content understanding in order to teach mathematical topics at the rigorous level that CCMS expects, and whether future mathematics teachers need the opportunities to learn rigorously the K-12 mathematical topics they are expected to teach down the road. Our paper addresses the knowledge gap in these two areas through investigating the understanding of the concept of slope among a group STEM majors who were enrolled in an undergraduate experimental teacher preparation program. We found that even among these students, there are holes in their conceptual understanding of slope and of the connection between linear equation and its graph. These weaknesses could pose challenges for their preparedness to teach the slope concept consistent with the rigor that CCMS calls for. Taking courses that specifically address the K-12 math topics is helpful. We discuss implications of these findings for the content preparation of mathematics teachers.