Teacher Knowledge in the Context of Articulating Arithmetic Operations and Place Value

International audiencePlace value plays a pivotal role in understanding numbers and arithmetic operations that universally cut across the primary and secondary curriculum. This study investigates the nature of 40 qualified teachers' knowledge in the context of articulating the role of place value in understanding arithmetic operations. The participants have 3-45 years of teaching experience who currently teach grades 1-8 (ages 6-14) in public or private schools in Turkey. The data consists of the videotapes of the semistructured interviews in which we asked the teachers to analyse five different scenarios consisting of alternative student solutions regarding arithmetic operations. Our initial findings suggest that teachers who operate with (partial) specialised content knowledge or without it analyse the given alternative solutions qualitatively differently. The analysis also reveals that the teachers rely mostly on common content knowledge that has little or no connections to a solid place value understanding