Teacher attention to number choice in problem posing

- Teachers attended to number choice as an element of their problem posing practices.
- Teachers had a range of ways for how they attended to number choice.
- A developmental progression for number choice moves from no attention, to beginning attention, to purposeful attention.

This study examined how teachers used number choice in contextualized word problems as a pedagogical approach for meeting instructional goals. By collecting and analyzing the contextualized word problems posed by 20 teachers along with their rationales, I identified several means by which teachers used number choice. Additionally, results indicate and characterize a progression for using number choice from no attention to purposeful attention. Implications for decomposing the teaching practice of posing problems to children are discussed.