• The Mathematical Education
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• v.60 no.4
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• pp.509-527
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• 2021

We investigated whether and how pre-service teachers took the realistic contexts seriously in the course of solving word problems; additionally, we investigated how pre-service teachers evaluated students' realistic and non-realistic answers to word problems. Many pre-service teachers, similar to students, solved some of the realistic problems unrealistically without taking the realistic contexts seriously. Besides, they evaluated students' non-realistic answers higher than the realistic answers. Whether the pre-service teachers could solve problems realistically or not, they did not appreciate students' realistic considerations for the reasons that those were not fitted to the intentions of the word problems, or those were evidence of the flaws of the problem. Furthermore, the analysis of premises implied in the pre-service teachers' evaluation comments showed the implicit didactic contracts about realistic word problem solving that they accepted and also anticipated students to follow. Our analysis of the pre-service teachers' conceptions of realistic word problems can help teacher educators design the teacher program to challenge and revise pre-service teachers' folk pedagogy.