Investigation of primary mathematics student teachers’ concept images: cylinder and cone

Investigation of pre-service elementary mathematics teachers’ understanding on solids

“…Except for the correct definitions, pre-service teachers focused on the basic elements of solids, when they define a solid. In literature (Bozkurt & Koç, 2012;Ertekin et al, 2014;Gökbulut, 2010;Gökkurt, 2014;Karakuş, 2018), it is stated that the pre-service teachers give less correct definition for the geometric objects and they mostly prefer to give general features of them.…”

“…On the other hand, pre-service teachers gave less correct definitions similar to the definitions in high school or university mathematics textbooks. Ertekin et. al.…”

“…To determine the pre-service elementary mathematics teachers' understanding on solids, a written questionnaire which has 16 open-ended and multiplechoice questions was developed. The questions were adapted from the literature (Ertekin, et al, 2014;Van de Walle et al, 2014) relating to teachers' knowledge and images about solids. The questionnaire consisted of four subsections.…”

“…In this section, the first question was about pre-service teachers' pyramid definition, the second question was to select which of the four given figures were pyramid, the third question was to select which of the four given figures were not pyramid, and the fourth question was to draw a pyramid different from the given pyramid figures. The word questions in the questionnaire were based on the study of Ertekin, et al (2014) and the cylinder, cone, prism and pyramid figures included in the questionnaire were selected from the "Geometric Thinking and Geometric Concepts" unit of Van de Walle et al (2014). The cylinder, cone, prism and pyramid figures used in this study were non-traditional figures.…”

“…In this context, it is important that teachers, and pre-service teachers should understand the geometric concepts. The studies, however, show that pre-service teachers have difficulties in understanding of geometric concepts and have misconceptions (Gutierrez & Jaime, 1999;Cunningham & Roberts, 2010;Kabaca, Karadag & Aktumen, 2011;Marchis, 2012;Pittalis, Mousoulides & Christou, 2010) In the literature, the main focus regarding cylinders, prisms and pyramids is mostly on middle school students (Avgören, 2011;Ergin & Türnüklü, 2015;Türnüklü & Ergin, 2016) and pre-service mathematics teachers (Bozkurt & Koç, 2012;Ertekin, et al, 2014;Gülkılık, 2008). Moreover, there are studies that examine the pedagogical knowledge of mathematics teachers (Gökkurt, 2014;Gökkurt, Şahin, Başıbüyük, Erdem & Soylu, 2014;Gökkurt, Şahin, Soylu & Doğan, 2015) and pre-service teachers (Gökbulut, 2010) regarding three dimensional figures.…”