A Digital Educational Path with an Interdisciplinary Perspective for Pre-service Mathematics Primary Teachers’ Professional Development

In this study we present an experimental research which analyses a designed pedagogical device based on the Core Concept (CC) to promote the pre-service primary teachers’ (PTs’) evolution of cognitive processes and recon- struction of mathematical meanings. The PTs have been involved in an educational path in which they solved an arithmetic-algebraic task, working in small groups in a learning digital environment. The task has been used to provoke a cognitive con- flict and social interactions to foster the discussion and make different perspectives emerge. We analyzed the PTs’ solutions through Radford’s model concerning the levels of generalization. Our analysis, supported by the PTs’ reflections, allowed us to highlight the crucial role of the CC, within the pedagogical device, in favor- ing the PTs’ transition from the factual level of generalization, to the contextual one, to the symbolic one. Moreover, previously unforeseen aspects arose: a mutual interplay between the mathematical goal and the understanding of the CC by the PTs arose.