Prospective Elementary School Teachers' Reconceptualization of Factors

Research on pre-service elementary school teachers’ (PSTs’) understanding of the multiplicative structure of number shows that PSTs struggle to use prime factorization to identify a number’s factors. This study investigates the benefits of a sequence of three instructional tasks aimed at strengthening PSTs’ understanding of factor by exploring the relation between a number’s prime factorization and its factors. Analysis of written pre- and post-assessments of 69 pre- and in-service elementary and special education teachers shows that the use of these tasks strengthened PSTs’ abilities to use prime factorization to identify factors and non-factors of both prime and composite numbers.