Factors That Influence Teachers Learning To Do Interviews To Understand Students' Mathematical Understandings

M. KATHLEEN HEID, GLENDON W.
BLUME, ROSE MARY ZBIEK and BARBARA

S. EDWARDS
FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE TEACHERS LEARNING TO DO

INTERVIEWS TO UNDERSTAND STUDENTS’ MATHEMATICAL
UNDERSTANDINGS
ABSTRACT. Understanding students’ understanding of mathematical ideas can inform

mathematics teaching, and task-based interviews are one way in which teachers can learn
more about their students’ understandings. The CIME project was designed to empower
mathematics teachers to use interviews to understand their students’ mathematical under-
standings as well as to prepare teachers to use technology-intensive curricula. This study
examined the influences on three high school mathematics teachers as they learned to use
task-based interviews to understand students’ mathematical understandings. The areas of
teacher knowledge and conceptions that influenced the teachers we studied were: teachers’
mathematical understandings and knowledge of technology and the perceived importance
of curriculum topics; teachers’ views of knowing mathematics; teachers’ perceptions of
students’ characteristics and needs; and teachers’ perceptions of interviewing and the role
of questioning in interviews.
A major goal of mathematics teaching should be the development of stu-

dent understandings that include deep and evolving connections among
mathematical ideas, facts, and procedures (Hiebert and Carpenter, 1992).
One possible way to improve mathematics instruction is for teachers to as-
sess students’ emerging understandings and how they arise. As Sierpinska
(1994) noted, for anyone to describe adequately an act of understand-
ing, the describer must attend to three aspects of the act: what is being
understood, the context in which it is being understood, and the mental op-
erations evoked in the act of understanding. Teachers need tools to access
these three aspects, particularly as they begin to implement an innovative
curriculum. There is some evidence that classroom teachers may use in-
terviews to reveal key aspects of their students’ thinking (Duit, Treagust
and Mansfield, 1996). However, if interviews are to be useful tools for
teachers to assess student understanding, it is important that researchers
more thoroughly investigate how teachers come to understand and to use
interviews as assessment tools.
Educational Studies in Mathematics 37: 223–249, 1999.

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.1
224 M. KATHLEEN HEID ET AL.
1. BACKGROUND
Mathematics teachers do not attempt automatically to determine students’

deeper understandings. Mathematics teachers may listen to students not
to understand their thinking but only to hear and evaluate their answers
(Davis, 1994). Similarly, teachers may read written responses only in terms
of whether answers are right or wrong (Even and Tirosh, 1995). When
teachers do try to listen, they may know what they expect to hear, listen
for it (without regard for other ideas expressed by students), and then
ascribe this desired knowledge to students (Towers, 1996). These obser-
vations suggest that we need ways to engage teachers in learning more
about students’ thinking.
Teachers can become more familiar with student understanding in vari-
ous ways. They can study research results in areas for which there is a
robust and accessible body of literature (Fennema et al., 1996). Analyz-
ing transcripts of teacher-student and student-student mathematical inter-
actions is seemingly helpful in developing awareness of possible under-
standings of students in general (Bowman et al., 1996), but it may not
empower teachers to investigate their students’ emerging mathematical
understandings. D’Ambrosio and Campos (1992) provided evidence that,
given exposure to research results and the opportunity to collaborate in
assessing students’ deeper understandings, prospective teachers may see
interviews as more informative about deeper understanding than written
tests. However, these prospective teachers along with their currently em-
ployed counterparts tended to start with tests, to interpret responses only
as right or wrong, and to use percents to compare the performance of
students. These findings suggest that teachers may value interviews but
are not naturally adept at using them or at using other means to explore the
complexity of student understanding.
2. O UR PERSPECTIVE ON INTERVIEWS
When assessing student understanding, interviewers ideally use and reflect

a rich understanding of mathematics, use probing questions to satisfy curi-
osity about students’ thinking, and treat the interviewee as a unique thinker.
Interviews should not only capture what the individual does but also how
the interviewee develops that mathematical understanding, including the
presence and interaction of concepts and procedures. A rich and connected
interviewer’s understanding of the mathematics not only influences choice
of productive tasks and initial questions, but also enables the interviewer
to configure meaningful on-the-spot probes that reveal each interviewee’s
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INTERVIEWS FOR UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING 225
thinking regardless of its match with the interviewer’s conceptions. The

interviewer is both a listener and a questioner whose knowledge of math-
ematics, technology, curriculum, and students feeds but does not limit the
pursuit of student thought. Our perspective includes: the notion of learning
as cognitive conflict, the importance of following the student’s thinking
rather than steering students into the interviewer’s way of thinking, an
awareness that discovery learning can become overly guided, and the po-
tential for interviews to reveal student choice of objects to understand, of
contexts in which to understand, and of mental operations.
Prior studies suggest that interviewing from this perspective could af-
fect teachers’ practices and student learning in particular mathematical
areas. The question driving this study is:
What beliefs and understandings influence secondary school mathematics teachers as they
learn to develop and interpret task-based interviews as tools for assessing student under-
standings and acts of understandings of mathematics within an innovative technology-
intensive algebra course?
3. M ETHODOLOGY
3.1. CIME project and interviews

The Computer-Intensive Mathematics Education (CIME) project was a
teacher enhancement and research project designed to study the role of
interviewing in empowering mathematics teachers in the teaching of tech-
nology-intensive mathematics curricula. The project’s activities centered
on the participants teaching Computer-Intensive Algebra (CIA) (Fey et al.,
1991, 1995). CIA is a beginning algebra curriculum organized around the
concepts of function and mathematical modeling and which assumes stu-
dent use of a computer algebra system or its equivalent. The CIME project
presumed that, through designing, conducting, and analyzing task-based
interviews of their students, teachers could develop a deeper understand-
ing of their students’ mathematical understandings and would therefore
improve their teaching. Interviews thus were interwoven intricately with
the goals of the CIME project: teachers were interviewees in interviews
conducted by the CIME staff; they watched and analyzed task-based in-
terviews of CIA students conducted by the CIME staff; they participated
in class sessions on interviewing; they designed, conducted, and analyzed
task-based interviews with CIA students; and some of them conducted and
analyzed task-based interviews with their own students.
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TABLE I
Teaching and mathematics backgrounds of Sara, LeAnne, and Bill
Years teaching Mathematics taught Mathematics courses

mathematics taken at or beyond
calculus level
Sara 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Algebra,

metic, introductory al- Geometry, Probability,
gebra, geometry Differential Equations,
Statistics, Structures,
Linear Algebra
LeAnne 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Elementary

metic, introductory al- Abstract Algebra, Col-
gebra, geometry lege Geometry
Bill 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Topics in Al-

metic, introductory algebra, Analysis, Geo-
gebra, intermediate al- metry
gebra, geometry
3.2. Cohorts and subjects

The CIME project involved 13 months of intensive work with each of two
cohorts of 30 secondary mathematics teachers. Each cohort participated in
a 4-week summer institute (Summer I1 ), implemented the CIA curriculum
in the schools at which they taught during the subsequent school year, and
returned for an additional one-week institute during the following summer
(Summer II) (see Heid et al., 1997). Roughly half of the participants also
enrolled in an academic-year course during which they designed, conduc-
ted, and analyzed interviews with their own students. The subjects in this
study are three teachers (Sara, LeAnne and Bill) who were part of the
second cohort. Table I details their teaching and mathematics backgrounds.
Our rationale for choosing these three subjects is described more fully in
subsequent discussion of data collection and analysis.
3.3. Instruments and data sources

One of the key instruments in this study was the interview schedule–the
plan for the interview including base questions, follow-up questions, and
guidelines for interacting in a variety of circumstances. We used four types
of interviews: task-based, scenario, documentation, and pre/post-observa-
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tion. In almost all cases, the researchers conducted these interviews–in

a few cases, other CIME staff members conducted the interviews. Task-
based interviews formed the core of the experiences of the participants. In
task-based interviews, interviewees were asked to solve non-routine math-
ematics problems assuming open access to multiple tools and representa-
tions, and freedom to use a strategy of their choice. Like the interviews they
had seen conducted by the researchers, the teachers conducted task-based
interviews with students with the expressed goal of better understanding
students’ mathematical understandings. The researcher-conducted inter-
views, however, had more elaborate interview schedules, deeper probing,
and more conceptually oriented tasks.
Scenario interviews required teachers to examine verbatim transcripts
of interviews with secondary students or of secondary mathematics class
sessions and probed the interviewees’ interpretations of students’ mathem-
atical understandings evidenced in the transcripts. Documentation inter-
views, along with eliciting basic information about their implementation
of CIA, addressed how interviewees viewed the teaching and learning of
technology-intensive mathematics in general, and of CIA in particular. Pre-
observation and post-observation interviews centered on the pre-active,
interactive, and post-active decisions the teachers made as they taught the
CIA lesson being observed.
Interviews conducted by the CIME staff and general class sessions on
interviewing were audiotaped and videotaped. Interviews conducted by
the participants and discussions they conducted about the interviews were
audiotaped and sometimes videotaped. Not all were videotaped because of
limitations in the availability of videotaping equipment.
Table II details the participation of the three case study participants
analyzed in this paper (the pseudonyms for these participants are Sara,
LeAnne, and Bill). All three targeted subjects participated in the summer
group activities. Sara and LeAnne were chosen for individual interviews
and classroom observations. LeAnne also participated in the academic-
year course.
3.4. Data preparation and analysis

Project staff transcribed interviews and analysis sessions, and proofread
transcripts (by checking the text against audiotape and videotape) on two
separate passes. We further edited the transcripts as discrepancies arose
during subsequent analysis. We focused our analysis on the transcripts for
six teachers in the two small groups for whom the most extensive data were
available, in an effort to answer the questions: ‘What was the meaning of
interviews for the participants?’ and ‘What did the participants believe or
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TABLE IIa
Interviewing experiences and nature of data for Summer I experiences
Activity in which participants engaged Products (data) Subjects

involved
CIME staff conducted individual task-based Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
and/or scenario interviews with cohort mem- scripts Bill
bers.
CIME senior staff conducted class session on Videotapes1 & Sara, LeAnne,
interviews. transcripts Bill
Cohort members read interview schedule,
viewed and discussed CIA student inter-
views conducted by CIME senior staff.
Cohort member groups conducted practice task- Tapes2 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
based interviews with each other. CIME senior scripts Bill
staff provided the tasks.
Interviewer, interviewee, and observers
analyzed and discussed the practice inter-
views.
CIME senior staff conducted second class ses- Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
sion on interviews. scripts Bill
Cohort members discussed their experi-
ence in conducting and participating in
interviews.
Cohort member groups planned, conducted, Tapes2 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
analyzed, and discussed task-based interviews scripts, Bill
they conducted with CIA students. summaries,
interview
schedules
Cohort member groups discussed with CIME Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
senior staff member their conduct and analysis scripts, Bill
of task-based interviews they conducted with newsprint
CIA students. summaries
of discussion
points
CIME staff conducted individual task-based Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne
and scenario interviews with targeted parti- scripts
cipants.
1 Sessions were audiotaped and/or videotaped by a member of the CIME staff.

2 Sessions were audiotaped and/or videotaped by the participants.
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TABLE IIb
Classroom observation and interviewing experiences with nature of data for aca-
demic-year experiences

involved
CIME staff visited the classrooms of three Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne
participants on four to five multi-day visita- scripts
tions. CIME staff conducted pre-observation
and post-observation interviews.
Cohort members enrolled in academic-year Tapes1 & tran- LeAnne

course attended three-day winter meeting, dur- scripts
ing which they were interviewed and worked on
their own interviewing techniques.
Cohort members enrolled in academic-year Tapes2 & tran- LeAnne

course conducted task-based interviews with scripts
own students.
CIME staff conducted individual task-based Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne
and scenario interviews with targeted parti- scripts
cipants.

know about understanding students’ mathematical understandings?’ We

coded each transcript for each member of the two groups as well as all
whole group transcripts, identifying passages that addressed these ques-
tions and using these codings to generate categories of data related to
learning to do interviews to understand student understanding. We chose
three of the six members of the two groups because of the completeness of
their data and the extent to which their three stories provided a collective
case study (Stake, 1994). Two (Sara and LeAnne) of the three were chosen
because the researchers were able to observe their classes, and the third
(Bill) was selected because, although less data existed about him, his views
and use of interviews were prominent in his data and presented a picture
that was complementary to those of Sara and LeAnne.
A framework arose as a result of our foci on how teachers understood
and used interviews and how they viewed students’ mathematical under-
standings. This framework helped identify and characterize influences on
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TABLE IIc
Interviewing experiences and nature of data for Summer II experiences

involved
Cohort member groups listened to and reana- Tapes2 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
lyzed Summer I CIA interviews conducted by scripts Bill
members of their group.
Cohort member groups planned, conducted, Tapes2 & tran- Sara, LeAnne,
analyzed, and discussed new CIA task-based scripts Bill
interviews.
CIME staff conducted individual task-based, Tapes1 & tran- Sara, LeAnne
scenario, and documentation interviews with scripts
targeted participants.

and obstacles to teachers’ learning to use interviews to understand student

understanding (Miles and Huberman, 1994). The framework included five
areas of teachers’ knowledge and conceptions: teachers’ conceptions of
learning and knowledge; teachers’ beliefs about teaching; teachers’ math-
ematical understandings and knowledge of technology and the perceived
importance of curriculum topics; teachers’ perceptions of students’ charac-
teristics and needs; and teachers’ perceptions of interviewing and the role
of questioning in interviews. The extent to which each teacher reached
our CIME interviewing goals was influenced by each of these areas of
teachers’ knowledge and conceptions and the interactions among them.
The nature of that influence differed for Sara, LeAnne, and Bill, as did
the extent of our information about each of the areas. Bill’s story comes
from a slightly different set of data, one that includes interviews with CIA
students and interviews and discussions with other teachers but does not in-
clude mathematics content interviews, scenario interviews, and classroom
observations.
4. A NALYSIS
As we observed and studied the CIME teachers’ experiences, we came to

appreciate the intricate nature of the process of learning to do interviews to
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understand students’ mathematical understandings. Several areas of teach-

ers’ knowledge and conceptions influenced the ways in which LeAnne,
Sara, and Bill used interviews to understand their students’ mathematical
understandings. These influences included: the teachers’ understandings
of mathematics and of the mathematics curriculum they were to teach, the
teachers’ perspectives of and facility with technology, the teachers’ per-
ceptions of students’ educational and emotional needs, and the teachers’
views of what it means to know mathematics. All of these factors were
further mediated by the teachers’ perspectives on the roles of interviews.
4.1 Mathematics-related influences on interviewing

Teachers’ personal relationships to mathematics affected their interviews
in several ways. First, teachers created tasks which reflected their own
mathematical understandings. Second, teachers’ mathematical understand-
ings governed what they sought in the data and how they followed up on
and interpreted student responses. Third, teachers’ perceptions of what
was important about mathematics in general or about the mathematics
in the CIA curriculum affected their choice of tasks, the ways in which
they followed up on student responses, and their assessment of student
understanding.
4.1.1. Effects of teachers’ knowledge of mathematics. Teachers’ limited

knowledge of the properties of various families of functions affected the
teachers’ choices of interview tasks. One of the interview questions posed
by the teachers in Sara’s group required students to identify the family
of functions which best described the quantitative relationship suggested
in each of three verbally stated situations. The group included one the
teachers believed would suggest a linear function, one they believed would
suggest a rational function, and one they believed would suggest a quad-
ratic function (see Figure 1 for the situation statements). To the group, and
to Sara, the universe of function families was limited, and the only function
family in their set (and possibly in their evoked repertoire of families)
which had global optimum points was the quadratic family. Sara described
the purpose of the interview question as seeing whether the interviewee
could recognize as quadratic a situation in which the data values increased
then decreased.
Teachers’ own mathematical understandings influenced their conduct
of task-based interviews, and this phenomenon was particularly salient
in the case of Sara’s work with families of functions and with quadratic
functions. Sara’s understanding of function and function family included
a tendency to confuse variable and parameter (for discussion of the math-
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Figure 1. Statements of problem situations used by Sara’s and LeAnne’s group in their
interviews with CIA students during Summer I.
ematical complications surrounding this type of confusion, see Bloedy-

Vinner, 1994), which exhibited itself throughout the year of her involve-
ment with the study. This confusion was still evident in a task-based inter-
view we conducted with Sara after she had taught CIA for a year. During
that interview, Sara was asked to explore the family of functions,
f (x) = a x + xb +c. Sara began her exploration by fixing the values of x at 2,
b at 1, and c at 0, and considering what happened to the value of the expres-
sion a x + xb +c as a increased. She graphed f (a) = a 2 + 12 , commented that
‘I’ve made a quadratic out of it’ and continued, drawing conclusions about
the function f (a) = a 2 + 12 . She continued her exploration by examining
the effects of changing the value of c (Heid, 1996). In an interview she
conducted with a CIA student during the second summer session, Sara’s
parameter-variable confusion seemed to direct her interviewing when Sara
led her interviewee toward her own (Sara’s) misconception. After the stu-
dent had produced a linear function, f (x) = 5x + 2, Sara guided the
student toward creating what Sara viewed to be another function from
the same family by substituting 0 for x in the expression 5x + 2. Sara
seemed quite satisfied when the student demonstrated an ‘understanding’
that matched her own.
Sara’s analysis of a student’s understanding of quadratic function was
influenced by her own unstable understanding of the concept. Her inab-
ility to call up appropriate parts of her understanding of quadratic was
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evidenced during Sara’s analysis of a student interview during the Scen-

ario interview at the end of Summer II. In considering a graph showing a
slightly asymmetric, concave up curve, Sara was trying to decide whether
the curve was that of a quadratic function, seeming not to recognize the
problems caused by the asymmetric nature of the curve. In spite of the
fact that Sara had within the same interview mentioned the symmetry of
the quadratic function, it seemed that Sara’s evoked working definition of
a quadratic curve required only that it changed direction once regardless
of its symmetry and her analysis required only that the student showed
evidence of knowing that property.
4.1.2. Effects of teachers’ perceptions of mathematics. Teachers’ per-

ceptions of what was important about mathematics in general or about
the mathematics in the CIA curriculum affected their choices of tasks, the
ways in which they followed up on student responses, and their assessment
of student understanding.
The perception that language and terminology were among the most
important parts of mathematics influenced LeAnne’s and Bill’s analyses of
student understanding. LeAnne strongly emphasized her use and students’
uses of particular terms. When she analyzed interviews, vocabulary and
language were two of her major foci. For example, she expressed concern
when a student said a function was linear giving the reason that it ‘had
no exponent’; she wanted him to say that it was linear because of the
‘first power,’ regardless of what either phrase meant to the student. To Bill,
knowing the correct vocabulary to use in talking about mathematical ideas
also seemed to be an important aspect of knowing mathematics. He asked
questions such as, ‘Did you have any vocabulary, any way of describing
that kind of situation?’ (Student Interview, Bill with Jarod, Summer II,
lines 264–5). In the following excerpt, Bill seemed to agree with his col-
leagues (Jayne and Alex) that knowing and using the vocabulary was an
important part of understanding a concept.
Jayne: He also mentioned increase, increasing functions. Yeah.

Bill: Yeah. I couldn’t get him to talk about rate of change.
Alex: It didn’t, he didn’t quite use that vocabulary.
Bill: He didn’t use it at all. [They chuckle.] I was trying to get him . . . to say that, and he
just, you know, he just wasn’t prepared to do that.
(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Alex/Bill/Jayne/Neal, Summer II, lines 59–65)
Throughout their interviews with students, the teachers’ perception of the

importance of vocabulary and language resulted in their overemphasizing
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the words students were using without attending to the mathematical ideas
embodied either in the talk around those words or in talk that did not
include the key phrases. LeAnne’s perception of mathematical ideas that
were important for students also included a distinction between justific-
ation and formal proof. To LeAnne, justifying meant supplying standard
reasons why mathematical claims were true. For example, while analyzing
interviews assessing a different topic, LeAnne consistently noted whether
students correctly identified a function as non-linear specifically because
of its non-constant rate of change.
What teachers believed was important about the CIA curriculum also
influenced the content of their interviews. LeAnne’s view of CIA mathem-
atics stressed alternative strategies and multiple representations. Her own
work and the lessons she conducted for her students included functions ex-
pressed through tables, graphs, and situations as well as in symbolic forms.
Her students studied patterns in graphs and tables. She interviewed stu-
dents to determine whether they could use these different representations
to answer real-world questions and to discuss families of functions.
LeAnne regularly encouraged students in all of her classes to use appro-
priate terminology, to solve problems with various strategies and multiple
representations, and to justify their responses with common explanations.
These clear priorities dictated her choice of interview tasks, her analysis of
interview transcripts, and her decisions about when and what to probe.
4.2. Technology-related influences on interviewing

In spite of the availability of an incredibly flexible and powerful computing
tool, the teachers in this study did not capitalize on the technology they had
available nor did they expect their interviewees to take advantage of this
technology. This phenomenon arose for two very different reasons.
4.2.1. The effects of viewing technology as curriculum. First, viewing

particular technology skills as part of the curriculum led teachers to test
students on a fixed set of strategies based on a computer algebra sys-
tem (CAS) without probing other actions or noting evidence of other un-
derstandings. LeAnne included learning to use technology as part of the
mathematics curriculum in the CIA course. She listed several basic CAS
strategies (e.g., zooming with graphs) among the things that she wanted
CIA students to know at the end of the year. Consequently, she developed
practice activities for class and tested students for CAS mastery. LeAnne
was determined that her students acquire the basic tool skills. One of the
reasons she chose to use interviews was to ‘test’ students on their basic
CAS-based strategies. She meshed this view of technology with the value
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she placed on multiple representations as she looked for interviewees’

success in using alternative CAS-based strategies that involved different
representations. Although students used the technology in other ways that
exhibited their understanding of the mathematics she valued, LeAnne did
not probe these actions during interviews and did not note immediately
evidence of these actions in her analysis of interviews.
4.2.2. The effects of a teacher’s reluctance to explore the technology. A

second way in which this reticence to capitalize on technology appeared
seemed to result from a teacher’s unfamiliarity with technology. Having
had little computer experience prior to her entry into the CIME Institute,
at times Sara behaved like someone who might be a technophobe. She
pointed out that it would take her much longer than others to learn how
to use a tool and she could not imagine her students learning to use a tool
quickly or facilely. Even after a year of using Calculus T/L II (Child, 1993)
with her students, she had acquired only a minimal set of capabilities to
work with the tool. She mastered the small set of tasks the students needed
in their work with the CIA curriculum, coached her students on these tasks
when they were working on the computer, and confined her questions to
students to ones employing tasks of this type. In spite of her tendency to
avoid computer use, however, Sara saw the importance of making tech-
nology a part of her teaching. Sara’s school district was just beginning
to acquire technology, and none of that technology had, in the past, been
stationed in individual mathematics classrooms. Even after her first year
of teaching CIA and the end of her formal commitment to use computers
in teaching algebra, Sara still had a bank of computers in her classroom,
and she used the computer as a regular feature of both her algebra and her
geometry classes.
Sara’s stance regarding technology seemed to influence her work with
interviews throughout the two years of the study. Sara saw the computer as
an important part of the CIA experience, and her interviews included sig-
nificant attention to assessing students’ computer skills. Perhaps because
Sara herself did not use or view the computer as a tool for exploration,
her goal seemed to be to focus only on the computer skills related to
completing tasks appearing in the CIA text. During Summer I, when Sara
was first learning about technology, she used the interviews with CIA stu-
dents as a time to carefully inventory what CIA students could do with
technology. This attention to the set of CIA computer skills as well as
to what Sara perceived as students’ levels of comfort continued during
the second summer, but the set of computer skills on which she focused
was smaller–a possible reflection of her having by that time identified a
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minimal set of CIA computer skills. Although there were plenty of untaken
opportunities for the student interviewees to explore families of functions
using computer tools, Sara did not note or wonder aloud about this lack of
computer use.
4.3. Student-related influences on interviewing

Teachers’ perceptions of students’ educational and emotional needs af-
fected their interviews. LeAnne voiced few views about students, but she
noted these few repeatedly and acted in ways that were consistent with
these views. She believed that students need teacher verification as re-
inforcement and lamented the lack of effort that several of her students
showed in and out of class. In the classroom, she rewarded students with
words and grades when they stayed on task and completed assignments.
When they were not successful, she used questions to redirect their at-
tention and their activities and to focus them on the planned mathematics
and tasks. Lines of questioning in these cases became increasingly leading
until the student produced the appropriate answer. Her goal seemed to be to
have students verbalize the particular response she had in mind, especially
if she knew the students had prior exposure to the mathematics involved.
In interviews, LeAnne’s probing matched her classroom questioning and
elicited similar responses from the interviewees.
Bill seemed to be very conscious of not making students uncomfortable
and found himself at odds with what he saw as a ‘no reinforcement’ direct-
ive from the Institute instructors. In the Summer II interview he refrained
from giving positive reinforcement, but immediately told the student, ‘I’m
sorry, don’t feel bad about this, but I’m not supposed to reinforce anything
here’ (Student Interview, Bill with Jarod, Summer I, lines 101–102). It is
possible that the lack of in-depth probing in his questioning in the Summer
I interview was partially a result of not wanting to embarrass the student.
This, he said to his partners, caused him to back off when the student said,
‘I don’t know’:
You know, if, if you ask a question and, and the student says, ‘I don’t know,’ you can ask
the question again, the kid’s going to still say, ‘I don’t know.’ . . . All you’re going to do is
make them feel embarrassed and real self-conscious as the interview proceeds. So, I had to
bail out a number of times when, when I saw that we were at a dead end and that she just
really did not understand.
(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Bill/Jayne/Alex, Summer I, lines 433–439)
Having taught for a long time in a small school in a very stable community,
Sara knew her students well. She had taught many of them several times,
and even for those students she was teaching for the first time, she had
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sometimes previously taught their older brothers or sisters–or at times even

their parents. Almost inevitably, Sara’s explanations for her interactions
with a student during class were couched in her overall perception of the
student, his or her home life, his or her past transgressions or successes,
and recent incidents relating to the student’s life. Just as Sara brought to
bear everything she knew in explaining the behavior of her own students,
she was similarly vigilant about using all of the information she had about
the CIA students (from other teachers’ classes) whom she and her CIME
colleagues interviewed. Throughout her group’s analysis of the interviews
they conducted, Sara was the ‘facts’ person, reminding her colleagues of
exactly what an interviewee did, exactly what he or she said, and exactly
how the interviewer reacted to the interviewee’s statements.
4.4. Influences on interviewing related to teachers’ views of knowing

mathematics
Three different features of teachers’ views of knowing mathematics af-
fected their interviews: they had different views of what it meant to know
mathematics, those views of knowing mathematics affected what they as-
sessed, and they believed students could not know mathematics which they
were not explicitly taught.
4.4.1. Teachers had different views of what it meant to know mathemat-

ics, and their views of knowing mathematics affected what they assessed.
When talking about interviews, LeAnne focused on three different forms
of what students knew or did not know. Interviewees could be forgiven
for being unaware of topics that were not taught to them. For example,
she claimed that students could not transfer experience with linear and
quadratic functions to questions about rational functions: ‘If they had never
had rational before, it’s probably a moot point in asking a question about
rational’ (Group Analysis of Student Interviews, LeAnne/Sara/Theo, Sum-
mer I, lines 414–417). If they were taught about a mathematical topic, they
would be at least aware of the topic. This occurred, according to LeAnne,
when students had been exposed to a topic but could no longer recall it.
Appropriate exposure led to knowing, knowing that consisted primarily of
remembering mathematical information and drawing ideas from memory.
LeAnne also allowed knowing mathematics to be context-dependent in
the sense that students’ knowledge of representations was bound to the
function families they had studied explicitly. LeAnne could assess under-
standing by providing interviewees with familiar contexts in which they
could demonstrate their knowledge and by urging them to remember when
they did not immediately offer what she thought she had taught them.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.15

Her interviews, like her exams and quizzes, consisted of items that closely
paralleled those in the CIA textbook. Her probing encouraged students to
remember what they had been taught.
Sara believed (and acted on the belief) that one can know mathematics
in a variety of different well-defined ways, and Sara’s summer interviews
with CIA students focused on bringing to the fore these predetermined
facets of a student’s mathematical knowledge. During these interviews,
she seemed to be trying to determine whether her interviewees’ concept
images had all of the features of her own. Sara’s picture of understanding
included seeing patterns, using notation, finding answers, verifying an-
swers, and relating concepts. Sara made fine distinctions in describing the
ways in which interviewees performed assigned tasks. She differentiated
the seemingly procedural and conceptual approaches she saw in two inter-
viewees working on the same problem. In light of Sara’s fairly robust view
of what it meant to know something, the way that she assessed that under-
standing was somewhat surprising. Frequently, she acted on the apparent
belief that knowing something meant being able to remember it, and so her
leading questions were acceptable. When she was communicating with a
student, especially an interviewee, Sara was more likely to urge the student
to try to remember an answer than to urge him or her to figure it out. In her
discussion with the other teachers in her group about what Wanda was not
able to do during the interview, Sara suggested that she would have liked
to have given Wanda the function rule (see Figure 1, Situation 3.), saying:
I’m also thinking about what I might have been able to do . . . I’m thinking maybe there’s
some things here that I could have done that would have helped her. . . . [I would have liked
to have given her the function rule] because I think she would have recognized that.
(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, LeAnne/Sara/Theo, Summer I, lines 209–216)
What seemed to matter to Sara was that Wanda would, after prompting,
recognize a particular relationship, not that she would be able to recon-
struct that relationship on her own. Like many other times in class and in
interviews, Sara seemed to operate from the assumption that if she could
give the student enough clues, the student would remember things she had
learned in the past but had forgotten. Sometimes this took the form of
seeming to want to ‘resituate’ the student in the environment in which the
past learning had occurred. Often, she urged students to remember what
they had learned by first recalling when they had learned it. Consistent
with her view of knowing as remembering, Sara referred to forgetting
when a student did not seem able to give an answer–even when she had
no evidence that the student ever knew the information.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.16

Bill’s language suggested that he viewed understanding as a binary ‘all

or nothing’ entity–either one knows or one does not know. As previously
mentioned, he noted that once an interviewee responded with ‘I don’t
know,’ additional questions would not be productive. This binary view was
apparent in both his analysis of the interviews and, at times, in the lack of
depth in his questioning techniques. Whereas the nature of understanding
was ‘all or nothing’ to Bill, the goal was the acquisition of a set of rules
or procedures for doing something–rules or procedures that were trans-
mittable from one person to another and knowledge of which could be
assessed or documented. Bill seemed to equate interviewees’ understand-
ings of fundamental ideas with their being able to perform designated tasks
such as using a graph to answer a question or substituting into a formula.
Learning such procedures, either by students or by Bill himself, involved
being shown ‘how to.’ Bill’s need to be told ‘how’ to do something is
evident in his expressed desire to receive ‘almost verbatim’ lesson plans
from other teachers and copies of other teachers’ interview tasks rather
than develop them himself.
4.4.2. Teachers expected that students would not know mathematics which
they were not explicitly taught. A dominant feature of learning, from all
three teachers’ perspectives, was that students could not generally have
been expected to know something unless they were explicitly taught it.
From LeAnne’s perspective, learning mathematics required explicit ex-
posure to the mathematics. However, a student may have awareness but
not know an idea from just one exposure. LeAnne countered this problem
with ‘re-teaching’: ‘when I re-teach, they say, ‘Oh, I’ve had that,’ and it
takes a little refresher’ (Documentation, LeAnne, Summer II, lines 525–
526). As the teacher, LeAnne saw her responsibility clearly: ‘I have to
supply them with . . . knowledge to be able to do [mathematics]’ (Docu-
mentation, LeAnne, Summer II, lines 515–516). Classroom activities often
combined explorations from the CIA materials with LeAnne’s carefully
prepared directions about what keys or commands to use. In this way, she
was ‘supplying’ the exposure students needed. When this simple exposure
was not enough, LeAnne would question students until they arrived at her
correct answers.
To Bill, both exposure and repetition were essential. In the following
quote Bill emphasizes the importance of frequent repetition, either of the
vocabulary or of the underlying idea, in class.
I knew that that was an important concept. So even right at the beginning of the year, I was
saying rate of change, rate of change, rate of, just repeating the idea, over and over, every
time we were talking about something and that was so that they would just be familiar with
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.17

the concept and be comfortable with it.

(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Alex/Bill/Jayne/Neal, Summer II, lines 156–160)
There is other evidence that he seemed to consider this exposure neces-

sary for understanding. When his group discussed the collection of linear
functions presented to CIA student interviewees, the issue of including
less familiar function rules arose. Bill rejected that idea by noting, ‘But I
don’t know that we covered that’ (Group Analysis of Student Interviews,
Alex/Bill/Jayne/Neal, Summer II, line 219). For Bill, understanding of
mathematics seemingly developed through repeated exposure to it in the
mathematics classroom.
4.5. Reasons related to teachers’ views of interviews

Just as teachers’ views of mathematics, interviews, students, and mathem-
atical knowing influenced the way they used interviews, so did their views
of the purpose of interviews. Three types of perspectives on interviews
affected the ways these teachers used interviews to understand students’
mathematical understandings. These views were: interview as a way to
compare students’ mathematical understandings against some standard,
interview as a procedure, and interview as a teaching opportunity.
4.5.1. Interview as a way to measure against a standard. The teachers in

our study viewed interviews primarily as a way to compare their students’
understanding against some standard. For Sara, the standard was her own
set of concept images; for LeAnne, the standard was the set of proced-
ures and concepts which she saw as part of the CIA curriculum; for Bill,
the standard was a list of procedures. Each of these views of interviews
suggested slightly different approaches to follow-up questions.
When she conducted concept-based interviews, Sara identified her own
set of understandings about the concept (her ‘concept image’), treating
this as a standard against which to measure students’ understandings. The
purpose of an interview was to determine the extent to which her inter-
viewee’s concept image matched Sara’s own concept image. To determine
the extent of the match, Sara would spend her interview time prodding
students to think about a piece of mathematics she had targeted and asking
them to remember what they had learned. Her task in an interview was
not to find out what a student was thinking about a concept but rather to
determine whether the student had, as part of his or her concept image, the
particular feature(s) that Sara was targeting. Sara valued probing, not so
much as a way to delve more deeply into student understanding, but as a
way to ‘prod’ the students to talk about each characteristic in her concept
image.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.18

Sara thought that the way to show knowledge was to remember it and
that knowing something required that it be taught explicitly. Sara’s inter-
views did not focus on a narrow set of skills, however, since Sara believed
that one could understand mathematics in a variety of different ways and
that someone could perform a skill without understanding related concepts.
Sara’s interviews contained a modicum of focusing questions (some aimed
at ‘resituating’ the student) since Sara assumed that knowing something
meant being able to produce it under probing conditions.
LeAnne valued interviews as an assessment tool that yielded inform-
ation about what students know that was different from that which her
exams and quizzes provided. Interviews allowed her to ‘draw out’ what
students knew when they did not offer it immediately. In LeAnne’s opin-
ion, there was a danger, however, that one could be too leading in trying
to see what students knew. In her interviews as in her classroom, good
questions did not tell students the answers but did help students remem-
ber mathematics to which they had been exposed. For example, when an
interviewee answered a real-world-situation question using computations
without first constructing a function model (as LeAnne’s group intended),
LeAnne redirected the student by asking, ‘Could you set up a rule?’ When
the student did not produce a rule, LeAnne focused the student further by
pointing to his series of similar computations which could be generalized
to a rule and asking, ‘What are you doing every time?’ (Student Interview,
LeAnne with Chuck, Summer I, lines 226–234). LeAnne’s curriculum in-
cluded a strategy of setting up function rules before answering questions
about the situation. In this interview, she was testing whether the student
could do this. When the student did not set up the rule, she redirected his
efforts by asking whether he could set up the rule. When the student did
not write the rule, LeAnne focused his attention on the common operation
(multiplication). In this way, she redirected and then focused the student’s
work, rather than eliciting and following the student’s thinking about the
task.
For Bill, the interviews, for the most part, seemed to be ‘check lists’ of
things the interviewees could perform without much probing into what
prompted them. They were checklists of things the interviewer wished
to see the interviewee perform, rather than an attempt to find out what
the interviewee understood. He noted that in two interviews ‘we were
able to get all the information we wanted. Not necessarily in the order
that we wanted...’ (Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Alex/Bill/Jayne,
Summer I, lines 525–529).
When he interviewed a CIA student with his ‘check list’ in mind, Bill
often did not focus on understanding. The first task of the interview sched-
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.19

ule designed by his group in Summer I asked the student to graph a quad-
ratic function on the computer and discuss the graph’s characteristics. The
interview schedule indicated that the student should be questioned about
the characteristics of a quadratic at this juncture, but Bill’s ‘check-list’
approach did not lend itself to checking the depth or breadth of student un-
derstanding. The student eventually got the graph of a quadratic function to
appear (without an on-screen vertex) and she concluded that the graph was
that of a quadratic. As scripted, he followed her statement that the graph
was quadratic by asking the interviewee how she would know ‘for sure’
that it was a quadratic, and the student then began to work on changing the
graphing window so the vertex was visible. Although Bill could have asked
the student to explain what her action told her about knowing whether the
graph was that of a quadratic, he did not do so. He probed no further.
Bill’s ‘check-list’ view of interviews suggested observable, but connec-
ted, tasks to be done in some (perhaps variable) order by the interviewee.
Since students needed to complete each of the subtasks, if a student did
not do so, Bill was puzzled about how to proceed. Since Bill’s interviews
focused more on knowing how to do than on understanding, if the student
could not do something the interview took longer because the interviewer
had to ensure that the student progressed through each of the subtasks to
facilitate completion of the subsequent subtasks of the ‘check list.’ How-
ever, for students who knew how to complete the subtasks, the interview
ended early.
4.5.2. Interview as a procedure to follow. To assist the teachers in learn-

ing how to do interviews, the CIME staff had involved the teachers as
interviewers and as interviewees, they had conducted several class ses-
sions on the nature and techniques of interviewing, and they had created
a videotape demonstrating interviews with CIA students. For Bill, inter-
viewing became a skill to be mastered with rules he had gleaned from these
experiences. Based on his viewing of videotaped sample interviews shown
in the class on interviews and on his experience of being interviewed by
the Institute staff, Bill derived certain ‘rules’ about interviewing. He in-
sisted that he and his colleagues should ‘follow the pattern that took place
in the interviews’ (Practice Interview, Jayne with Alex, Summer I, lines
117–119) and tried to mimic these questioning techniques.
Bill’s first rule was that the interviewer must question the interviewee
frequently, every 30 seconds or even every 15 seconds.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.20

Bill: . . . you need to ask questions so that the um, no, lengthy amount of time, and I would
say probably fifteen seconds or something like that. You’d probably be asking a
question every fifteen seconds or somewhere in that time period. Just because . . .
Jayne: Whether or not it’s necessary?
Bill: Right. Right. And, but most of the time it would be. Just because, if I’m talking I’m
going to say things, and it’s, the point is not that you understood what I was doing,
that has nothing to do with it either. The point is, why did I say that? That’s really
what’s at issue.
(Analysis of Practice Interview, Alex with Bill, Summer I, lines 201–210)
Having derived this rule about asking frequent questions, he created a

plausible rationale for the rule. One part of that rationale was that frequent
questions better enabled him to find out why an interviewee responded
as he or she did. Another part of Bill’s rationale for the 15-second rule
might have been that such questioning provided immediate feedback to
the interviewee about the correctness of his or her procedure.
Bill’s second rule of interviewing was that one must ask interviewees to
either ‘justify’ or ‘clarify’ what they say and do. He shared this rule with
his partners during the discussion following Jayne’s practice interview
with Alex:
It’s more that he comes up with an idea and you ask him to clarify the idea, whether or
not you understand it. . . . Every time he would . . . say something, you should, regardless of
whether you understand it or not, you would ask him to justify his reason.
(Practice Interview, Jayne with Alex, Summer I, lines 182–185)
In some instances the ‘clarification’ requested by the interviewer appeared

to be for the benefit of the student (getting the student to clearly state or
recognize what he or she had done or described) rather than for the benefit
of the interviewer.
Bill wondered whether there would ever be a circumstance in which the
interviewee would work and the interviewer would not ask questions.
I think that’s a question we need to ask when we get back together. Is there a situation where
a student was to continue working without the need for prompting . . . is it conceivable that
you would have a situation where you wouldn’t ask? And I’ll bet they’ll say no.
(Practice Interview, Alex with Bill, Summer I, lines 172–176)
Bill’s emphasis here was not on what he thought made sense but rather on
guessing the correct procedure for conducting an interview.
4.5.3. Interview as a teaching opportunity. These teachers occasionally

used interviews as teaching opportunities. Such was the case for LeAnne
when she gave an interviewee a set of data with the intention of ‘changing
his mind’ about what function family should be used to model the situation.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.21

It is not surprising that her interview probing follows the funneling pattern
of her classroom questioning. Her actions seemed to be based on her oblig-
ation to teach and her tendency to algorithmitize instruction, as described
by Steinbring (1989). She wanted to hear and reinforced these anticipated
responses and ideas with an enthusiastic ‘good’ or ‘okay.’ As a result, she
seemingly missed probing opportunities, as in the jumbled exchange with
Chuck in the section on interview as a way to measure against a standard.
In short, not only did LeAnne describe and use interviews as an opportun-
ity to determine how well students really knew the curriculum content, but
she also used them to ‘reteach’ students who could not remember and to
help students ‘discover’ what they did not clearly know.
5. S UMMARY
The stories of these three teachers reveal the ways in which a teacher’s
relationship to mathematics, curriculum, technology, students, teaching,
and especially learning and knowing mathematics influence her or his use
of interviews as tools to understand student understanding. Each of these
three teachers looked through a different lens as she or he learned to use
interviews as a tool for understanding student understanding. Their lenses
defined what they saw as the mathematical knowledge they could and
should access through interviews. Sara’s lens was her set of concept images
for the mathematical understandings she was assessing. LeAnne’s lens was
the mathematics curriculum that was the goal of her instruction. Bill’s
lens was the set of skills students should be able to perform. The lenses
defined how they saw interviews and how they viewed the understandings
that emerged through those interviews.
These teachers’ views of learning and knowing mathematics seemed to
have had an important impact on their approaches to interviewing. None
of the teachers spoke or acted as if they believed that an individual’s know-
ledge was the unique product of his or her personal interactions with ex-
periences and ideas. Each teacher seemed to believe that exposure to math-
ematics was a prerequisite to learning it and that the resulting knowledge
remained in student memory. There was a difference however in terms of
what the teachers expected students to remember. Sara valued process; she
‘resituated’ students to get them to remember how to solve the problem or
how to relate the ideas. LeAnne valued outcome; she used questioning to
draw those outcomes from students’ memories. Bill valued students having
the right way to do something; he did not need to draw out information
from students or resituate students since he believed that they either knew
or did not know the targeted skill. Each teacher planned and used inter-
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.22

views to test whether students knew what they had been taught. What was
important to each teacher was not the uniqueness of the individual’s un-
derstanding, but the match between the student’s understanding and some
standard. Once the extent of the match was determined, it made no sense
to dig more deeply into what the student was thinking.
The issue of the use of probing questions in interviews permeated not
only CIME class discussions but also the teachers’ group analyses of their
interviews. Each of the three subjects had participated in classes in which
probing questions were discussed; each had witnessed the use of probing
questions by CIME instructors in sample interviews with CIA students;
and each talked about his or her own and each other’s probing. It seemed
that they not only believed they understood probing but that they care-
fully monitored their own probing and that of their partners. Given that
they were not addressing understanding as the researchers characterized it,
however, the nature of their follow-up questions veered away from prob-
ing for deeper conceptual understanding. Sara asked follow-up questions
when she wanted students to consider a particular feature of a concept.
LeAnne used follow-up questions to draw out particulars when a student’s
response did not include the correct answer. Bill asked follow-up ques-
tions to keep the interview moving along and going smoothly. There was
no evidence that any of the teachers experienced conflict between their
‘probing’ questions and what they thought we expected.
The particular role of technology in a teacher’s interviews seemed in-
fluenced by the relative depths of the teacher’s understandings of math-
ematics and technology as well as by the teacher’s goals for interviews.
For each of the three subjects, understanding was a function of the match
between what a student could do and some fixed set of items. Although
each of the three subjects was knowledgeable about the items required by
her or his individual view of understanding (concept images, curriculum
content, and checklists), using interviews to understand student under-
standing depends on the interviewer having facility with the computing
tools and much richer mathematical understandings than would arise from
knowing only the mathematical skills explicitly taught in the CIA cur-
riculum. Neither LeAnne nor Sara entered the CIME program with an
extensive understanding of the mathematical concepts central to the CIA
curriculum. Developing a deep mathematical understanding was not an
issue for LeAnne since she viewed the only relevant mathematics as the
mathematics in the curriculum she was to teach her students. Her com-
puting skills were adequate for the interviews in that she had been fairly
diligent about practicing CIA computing tasks on her home computer.
Sara entered CIME with almost no computer experience, she did not have
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.23

access to the CIA software at home, and she could seldom find time to
work on her computer skills at school. She failed to learn the mathematical
ideas which could have been enhanced through CAS use since she did not
actively seek an understanding of computer results. Sara’s inability to call
up at appropriate times the mathematics she knew and her reluctance to
explore the technology inhibited her development of a rich understanding
of the mathematics that characterized the CIA curriculum. Hers was not
a rich mathematical understanding because it was not always a connected
mathematical understanding.
6. C ONCLUSIONS
At first, the difficulties teachers had in learning to use interviews to under-

stand their students’ understandings may have been a reflection of the dif-
ferences between their goals and the goals of the project. To Sara, LeAnne,
and Bill, understanding student understanding was not problematic. Inter-
viewing their students may have addressed a problem they did not own. At
first, the main reason the teachers seemed to see for talking individually
with students was to teach them, and so they seemed first to view inter-
viewing as teaching. As teachers, they were accustomed to questioning
their students, almost in a guided discovery mode, to help them arrive at an
appropriate answer for a problem. They used the interview to prod students
toward the correct answers, instead of, as the researchers had intended,
probing students’ thinking as a means of increasing their knowledge of
their students. As they came to see the potential of interviews for learning
more about their students’ understandings and acts of understanding, the
teachers’ views of the nature of mathematics learning became the defining
feature of the interviews they conducted.
Our study has examined teachers’ uses of interviews by looking closely
at the experiences and actions of three teachers. We identified general
factors that influenced this process and characterized these teachers’ work
with interviews in light of prior studies. LeAnne and Sara found that in-
terviews could reveal what they saw as key aspects of students’ thinking
(as in Duit et al., 1996). Like the prospective teachers of D’Ambrosio and
Campos (1992), they found interviews more informative than written tests;
unlike those prospective teachers, however, they did not necessarily focus
on deep understandings. Unlike Bill and unlike the teachers in Even and
Tirosh’s (1995) study, neither LeAnne nor Sara focused only on whether
the students’ answers were right or wrong. Similar to the observations of
Towers (1996) and Davis (1994), all three CIME teachers seemed to note
only what they expected to hear without particular regard for other ideas
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.24

expressed by the students. Sara listened for a match with some feature of
her concept image; LeAnne and Bill listened for vocabulary and their pre-
determined lists of reasons or skills, respectively. Bill inventoried students’
use of technology along with their mathematics skills; LeAnne viewed
technology syntax separate from mathematics knowledge. While LeAnne
and Sara seemed to have made progress in using interviews as tools for un-
derstanding student understanding, Bill made the least progress, seeming
to treat the process as a well-defined routine. Perhaps because he viewed
understanding as the ability to perform a fixed set of procedures, he seemed
to view the interview as an oral quiz.
Our work in helping mathematics teachers use interviews to understand
student understanding reveals the importance of learning more about help-
ing teachers to develop more robust and useful understandings of math-
ematics as well as views of mathematical learning and knowing. In the
cases of Sara, LeAnne, and Bill, these understandings and views detracted
from our efforts to help them to understand their students’ understand-
ings through task-based interviews. The CIME project was about helping
teachers to learn about their students’ understandings as well as to un-
derstand CIA mathematics and technology. It was no surprise therefore
that teachers’ emerging views of mathematical knowledge and learning
dominated their use of interviews to understand student understanding.
The unpredicted but understandable stories of teachers learning to do and
use interviews yielded a picture of the complexity of the interaction among
factors that influenced teachers’ understanding of and use of interviews as
tools for understanding student understanding.
N OTES
1 We will refer to the first summer of a cohort’s involvement as Summer I and the
second summer of a cohort’s involvement as Summer II.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Found-

ation under Grant No. TPE 91-55313. Any opinions, findings, and con-
clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.
educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.25

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for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, ERIC Clearinghouse Columbus, OH,
pp. 527–532.
M. KATHLEEN HEID and GLENDON W. BLUME

Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16803,
U.S.A.
ROSE MARY ZBIEK
Department of Mathematics and Department of
Curriculum and Instruction,
The University of Iowa,
Iowa City, IA 52242,
U.S.A.
BARBARA S. EDWARDS
Department of Mathematics,
Oregon State University,
Corvallis, OR 97331,
U.S.A.
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Factors That Influence Teachers Learning To Do Interviews To Understand Students' Mathematical Understandings

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Factors That Influence Teachers Learning To Do Interviews To Understand Students' Mathematical Understandings

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M. KATHLEEN HEID, GLENDON W.

BLUME, ROSE MARY ZBIEK and BARBARA

FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE TEACHERS LEARNING TO DO

ABSTRACT. Understanding students’ understanding of mathematical ideas can inform

A major goal of mathematics teaching should be the development of stu-

Educational Studies in Mathematics 37: 223–249, 1999.

Pips: 207519; WTB: EDUC783 GSB web2c: 7020032 (educkap:humnfam) v.1.15

Mathematics teachers do not attempt automatically to determine students’

When assessing student understanding, interviewers ideally use and reflect

educ783.tex; 16/06/1999; 13:56; p.2

thinking regardless of its match with the interviewer’s conceptions. The

3.1. CIME project and interviews

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Years teaching Mathematics taught Mathematics courses

Sara 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Algebra,

LeAnne 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Elementary

Bill 20+ Yrs Applications of arith- Calculus, Topics in Al-

3.2. Cohorts and subjects

3.3. Instruments and data sources

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tion. In almost all cases, the researchers conducted these interviews–in

3.4. Data preparation and analysis

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Activity in which participants engaged Products (data) Subjects

1 Sessions were audiotaped and/or videotaped by a member of the CIME staff.

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Activity in which participants engaged Products (data) Subjects

Cohort members enrolled in academic-year Tapes1 & tran- LeAnne

Cohort members enrolled in academic-year Tapes2 & tran- LeAnne

1 Sessions were audiotaped and/or videotaped by a member of the CIME staff.

know about understanding students’ mathematical understandings?’ We

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Activity in which participants engaged Products (data) Subjects

1 Sessions were audiotaped and/or videotaped by a member of the CIME staff.

and obstacles to teachers’ learning to use interviews to understand student

As we observed and studied the CIME teachers’ experiences, we came to

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understand students’ mathematical understandings. Several areas of teach-

4.1 Mathematics-related influences on interviewing

4.1.1. Effects of teachers’ knowledge of mathematics. Teachers’ limited

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ematical complications surrounding this type of confusion, see Bloedy-

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evidenced during Sara’s analysis of a student interview during the Scen-

4.1.2. Effects of teachers’ perceptions of mathematics. Teachers’ per-

Jayne: He also mentioned increase, increasing functions. Yeah.

(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Alex/Bill/Jayne/Neal, Summer II, lines 59–65)

Throughout their interviews with students, the teachers’ perception of the

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4.2. Technology-related influences on interviewing

4.2.1. The effects of viewing technology as curriculum. First, viewing

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she placed on multiple representations as she looked for interviewees’

4.2.2. The effects of a teacher’s reluctance to explore the technology. A

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4.3. Student-related influences on interviewing

(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, Bill/Jayne/Alex, Summer I, lines 433–439)

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sometimes previously taught their older brothers or sisters–or at times even

4.4. Influences on interviewing related to teachers’ views of knowing

4.4.1. Teachers had different views of what it meant to know mathemat-

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(Group Analysis of Student Interviews, LeAnne/Sara/Theo, Summer I, lines 209–216)