Abstract:

Mathematics content knowledge is not the only one because pedagogical knowledge is also required while teaching mathematics. Teachers develop instructional explanations with their pedagogical content knowledge; these explanations are effective on students' learning. This study aims to determine instructional explanations of mathematics teachers about area measurement, whether they use measurement estimation skills in their instructional explanations, and what strategies they use if they do. The study was conducted with 12 middle school mathematics teachers with various years of experience. Instructional explanations were obtained by semi-structured interviews and analyzed descriptively according to understanding levels that were developed by Kinach (2002a). Measurement estimation skills were also examined. The study concluded that teachers’ instructional explanations are mainly at the instrumental level, and in the sub-categories of this level, they are mostly distributed as directly expressing the rules and relations and directly expressing how a procedure will be applied. Teachers made an instructional explanation by including the estimation skill in the question that obviously required estimation but did not mention estimation in other questions. The benchmark (reference point) strategy was used by teachers. Last, teachers’ measurement estimation was found partially correct because of not using any numerical explanation about area measurement.

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