Time, depth, and perseverance: Supporting elementary pre-service teachers’ engagement in productive struggle in mathematics

Elementary pre-service teachers (ePSTs) must learn to engage in and support productive struggle, yet little is understood about how preparation coursework can cultivate the perseverance that sustains such engagement. This study examines how differences in instructional time and depth within an elementary mathematics content course support ePSTs’ engagement in productive struggle through perseverance during problem solving. Perseverance is conceptualized as the enactment of productive struggle, reflected in how learners initiate, sustain, re-initiate, and re-sustain effort when facing mathematical uncertainty. Guided by distinctions between thinking-oriented and knowledge-oriented approaches to teacher preparation, the study compared two course conditions. In a quasi-experimental design, 60 ePSTs participated in 12 problem-solving sessions while enrolled in either a thinking-oriented treatment section that studied five topics in depth or a knowledge-oriented control section that studied ten topics more broadly. Perseverance was measured using the Three-Phase Perseverance Framework, and written reflections were analyzed for mechanisms supporting productive struggle. Results showed that treatment-group ePSTs demonstrated higher perseverance scores and greater engagement with processes including deliberate practice, affect regulation, self-scaffolding, leveraging conceptual understanding, learning about heuristics, and mastery-oriented goals. Findings suggest that time-intensive, conceptually focused environments may help prepare ePSTs to engage in and support productive struggle in their classrooms.