TEACHERS’ RECOGNITION OF THE DIAGRAMMATIC REGISTER AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR TEACHING

Abstract

We examine responses from a national sample of high school mathematics teachers to a questionnaire, which had been developed to study teachers’ recognition of a system of hypothesized norms that stipulate that geometry proof problems are to be posed using a diagrammatic register. We report on the psychometric properties of the questionnaire, as well as the relationship between these mathematics teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching geometry (MKT-G) and their stances on breaching those norms. Although Herbst et al. (2013) hypothesized that the system consisted of five distinguishable sub-norms, the factor structure of the questionnaire suggested that two of those norms might not truly be distinguishable. We also found a positive and significant relationship between teachers’ MKT-G and their stances on breaching two of the determined components of the system of norms.