Characterizing the Meaning of Multiple by Pre-Service Elementary School Teachers

This paper is part of a wider study focused on divisibility. Participants were prospective elementary teachers. One of the aims of the research is to characterize the meanings of multiple shown by prospective teachers. In this paper, we present the results concerning this aim. We analyse the productions of 37 prospective elementary teachers collected in a practice session, designed and developed in the context of a teaching experiment. We characterize the meanings through the following elements of the didactic analysis: conceptual structure, representation systems and phenomenology. Prospective teachers showed mostly three meanings of multiple: product, relationship and dividend in an exact division.