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Mathematical and statistical thinking is involved across the breadth of people's home and work life and leisure activities. This paper reports on an aspect of a project that aimed to develop preservice teacher awareness of the mathematical and statistical thinking required across the breadth of primary teachers' professional role. This thinking is conceptualised as the mathematics and statistics embedded in each of the curriculum learning areas, in data literacy, and administration and management tasks. Mentor meetings indicated pre-service teachers who were completing a one-year graduate diploma initially had a limited awareness of the extent of this thinking. Through focus group discussions across the year participating preservice teachers' commentary showed an increased awareness and appreciation of the breadth of contexts where teachers might encounter mathematics and statistics thinking beyond mathematics lessons. Given awareness is fundamental to learning and subsequent action we posit that developing this awareness during teacher education is important.

New Zealand teacher educators are faced with the challenge of how to prepare their student teachers to become beginning teachers who are able to base their teaching upon the national curriculum. To meet this challenge, designers of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes need to consider the interface between ITE curriculum and the legislated curriculum for schools. This paper looks at some of the historical influences upon the curriculum in both initial teacher education and schools by examining wider contextual influences. We point out that in ITE there has been an ongoing search for the most appropriate knowledge base for teaching, a search that is made problematic due to differing views of knowledge, teaching and learning We argue that in spite of these differences, there is benefit in an ITE curriculum that has a close relationship with the school curriculum in terms of what is learned and the teaching and learning approaches. New Zealand has a revised national curriculum for schools (Ministry of Education, 2007) that schools are expected to implement from 2010. In preparing student teachers to become beginning teachers, ITE providers are in a phase of designing learning experiences that link ITE curriculum and school curriculum. This process is problematic, for there are various internal and external pressures that lead to a crowded ITE curriculum and challenge ITE autonomy and innovation in curriculum decisionmaking.

The purpose of this study was to enhance the teaching and learning of matter and its properties for grade 6 students. The development of a conceptual change approach instructional unit was undertaken for this purpose. Pre-and post-concept surveys, classroom observations, and student and teacher interviews were used to collect data. The teaching activities not only challenged and encouraged students' conceptual change but also indicated that teachers needed to develop their content knowledge and teaching strategies. The participants developed more scientific conceptions and were able to apply these in appropriate contexts. This study illustrates how a conceptual change approach can be accomplished in the Thai context.