What Modelling Tasks Do Prospective Teachers Propose? Some Cases in Mathematics Teacher Education

In this chapter, we characterised and classified tasks designed and implemented by prospective teachers during their educational internship experiences and which they considered as «modelling tasks». To this end, we firstly reviewed 337 master’s degree final projects, where we found 113 tasks referred to modelling; secondly, we characterised each task, by considering the attributes of a modelling problem; and finally, we classified each task by using a theoretical scheme. Based on this classification, we found that 10 of the 113 tasks can be considered as «modelling problems» and the 103 remaining tasks as «other types of tasks». Regarding these 103 tasks, we can conclude that most of them reduced the modelling process to the mathematisation of their wording, prioritising mathematics over the real world, and providing all the necessary data for their solving with a prefixed mathematical object.