An evaluation of contextual teaching and learning experience with pre-service mathematics teachers

Educational reform efforts have been taken place all over the world; especially developing countries including Turkey. In order to these efforts to be successful, a meaningful and real-world connected learning and also an appropriate teaching which helps to realize this goal are very crucial. Contextual teaching and learning approach is believed to address many aspects of this issue. When related studies were examined, its effects on students? success and on affective constructs were found as the main research focus. In contrast, the literature related to knowledge construction in different processes was very limited and lacked reflecting an insight of the intervention processes of contextual teaching and learning. The purpose of this study is to develop models and theories by examining the reflections of the learning process that was designed in accordance with contextual teaching and learning approach in the directions of construction of mathematics knowledge and the processes of REACT strategy based on the learners? and the instructors? experiences.This study was conducted with 64 pre-service mathematics teachers in two different classes who were taking ?Mathematics and Life? course by using qualitative research approach. Participant observations, student journals, student-student and student-teacher discourses and activity sheets were employed to collect data. Qualitative data were analyzed based on grounded theory strategy by utilizing NVivo 8.0 software. In this study, practices of pre-service mathematics teachers with the processes including relating, experiencing, applying, cooperating, and transferring were evaluated. Each process was examined in detail in order to determine how mathematics knowledge is being constructed and what factors might affect these processes. A grounded theory and a related model were presented for each process mentioned above as a result of qualitative analysis from open coding toward selective coding. At the end of the study, recommendations based on the results of the study were also provided for researchers and educators.Key Words: Mathematics Education, Contextual Teaching and Learning,Connections, Pre-service Mathematics Teachers, Grounded Theory