Measuring teacher awareness of children's understanding of equivalence

Children’s understanding of the equals sign has been widely studied and identified as an important issue for thinking flexibly about arithmetic and learning algebra. Experiences in primary mathematics lessons impact significantly on understanding, but relatively few studies have investigated primary teachers’ awareness of children’s understanding. One reason may be that while carefully validated instruments exist for measuring children’s understanding, no such instrument is available for evaluating teacher awareness. We analyse the performance of a questionnaire administered to 197 primary teachers in New Zealand and the UK, and identify how individual items are likely to elicit different teacher responses.