Understanding Primes: The Role of Representation

Rina Zazkis, Peter Liljedahl
2004 Journal for Research in Mathematics Education  
In this article we investigate how preservice elementary school (K-7) teachers understand the concept of prime numbers. We describe participants' understanding of primes and attempt to detect factors that influence their understanding. Representation of number properties serves as a lens for the analysis of participants' responses. We suggest that an obstacle to the conceptual understanding of primality of numbers is the lack of a transparent representation for a prime number.
doi:10.2307/30034911 fatcat:lu2c7pzsnvcxdkd6t2yhn2rara