Investigating the Use of Prompts on Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Problem-Posing Processes

This study aimed to investigate the problem-posing processes of prospective teachers when they were given different prompts for the same situation. The teachers were asked to pose problems for the matchstick pattern to their classmates with one of the following prompts: (1) pose three different problems or (2) pose one easy, one moderately difficult, and one difficult problem. Eight pairs of participants received each prompt, totaling 16 pairs. The findings indicated that different prompts resulted in different types and frequencies of transitions between the steps of the problem-posing model outlined in the study. Moreover, participants demonstrated varying degrees of attention to the components of each prompt across the steps of the model and of consideration of factors outside the prompts’ explicit components.