Using Design Patterns for Math Preservice Teacher Education

Experienced teachers effectively address student misconceptions and learning difficulties by employing high-quality pedagogical strategies that they have developed through experience. It is difficult to discover effective strategies because it takes a lot of trial and error before a teacher can conclude that a particular approach improves student learning. Researchers have used educational design patterns to encapsulate high-quality strategies that facilitate the transfer of pedagogical knowledge. In this work, we investigated the feasibility of utilizing three educational design patterns as a teaching tool for math preservice teacher education: Feedback Sandwich, Pitfall Diagnosis and Prevention, and Worked Examples. Specifically, we used design patterns to investigate how preservice teachers provided feedback to students who gave common wrong answers to a given math problem and compared their feedback before and after they were introduced to educational design patterns. Results indicated that design patterns helped preservice teachers consider other aspects of feedback such as students' self-regard, common misconceptions, and prior knowledge into their feedback for common wrong answers on math problems. The limited set of three design patterns introduced in the study focused on feedback presentation. Results also indicated preservice teachers may benefit from design patterns that address other aspects of feedback such as content granularity, feedback length, and presentation medium. Implications of this study, including the potential of using educational design patterns to improve preservice teacher education, are discussed.