Özet
Preparing pre-service mathematics teachers (PSTs) to interpret and represent students’ mathematical reasoning is an important component of teacher education. This study examines PSTs’ explicit use of Toulmin component labels in written representations of middle-school students’ solution traces produced within a Metaforms-like constraint-puzzle design assignment. Across three cohorts (2022–2023, 2023–2024, and 2024–2025), 72 final-project submissions had consent for research use; one submission was excluded because it did not meet the mandatory Toulmin-structuring criterion, leaving an analytic corpus of 71 assignments. Each assignment included a self-designed puzzle, a record of a student’s observable solution trace, and a PST-authored written representation of that trace. The study used descriptive document analysis supplemented by assignment-level frequency summaries of explicit Toulmin labels. Data was explicitly labeled in 29 assignments (40.8%), Warrant in 27 (38.0%), Claim in 23 (32.4%), and Backing in 21 (29.6%). Qualifier appeared in 6 assignments (8.5%) and Rebuttal in 9 (12.7%); 12 assignments (16.9%) contained at least one of these two epistemic labels. Because Qualifiers and Rebuttals are not functionally required in every deductive step, their relative rarity is interpreted as a pattern of explicit labeling under the assignment conditions rather than as evidence of deficient reasoning. The findings indicate uneven explicit uptake of Toulmin terminology and underscore the importance of distinguishing component labeling from the underlying argumentative function or quality of a reasoning step.
