Teachers' ability to respond to student thinking is important for effective teaching. Considering the importance of the decisions and steps to be taken by teachers in responding to student thinking in teaching environments where conceptual understanding that brings meaningful learning is aimed at, it is understood that prospective teachers' skills in responding to student thinking should be improved. One of the current approximation of practices used in the development of prospective teachers' instructional skills is scripting task practices. The aim of this study was to reveal the alignment between theory and approximation of practice in the context of conceptual and procedural understanding of prospective mathematics teachers' ability to respond to student thinking through scripting tasks. Being one of the qualitative research methods, in the present study, we used a case study to examine how prospective teachers responded to students' ideas. For this purpose, we asked 38 prospective mathematics teachers to write how they would take an instructional step on a problem related to student thinking and then justify it by completing a scenario prepared on the same problem. We subjected the data to content analysis and open coding. The findings revealed that nearly half of the prospective teachers aspired to teach for conceptual understanding and were able to demonstrate this in their scripting task practices. Prospective teachers who aimed for conceptual teaching in theory mostly failed to reflect this focus in their approximation of practices. There were also prospective teachers who pursued only a procedural focus, both in theory and in approximation of practice. There were no prospective teachers who pursued a procedural focus in theory and realized conceptual teaching as an approximation of practice. We discuss the findings in the context of the relevant literature.

Scripting tasks, responding, conceptual understanding