The effectiveness of teaching one and two dimensional motion on prospective teachers? learning using mathematical modeling

Although in theory it is expected that students should relate mathematics and physic in everyday life, in practice relating these two subject areas has not been succeed as literature asserts. However, using mathematical modeling in physic lessons has contributed to relating real life, physic and mathematics. Taking this reality into account this study investigates prospective science teachers? learning effectiveness in physic lessons using mathematical modeling in teaching of topics, one and two dimensional motion. A quasi-experimental design was employed in this study involving a control and an experiment group. Guiding materials were prepared for both prospective science teachers and their lecturers. The experimental group consisted of 23 prospective scienceteachers and control group consisted of 22 prospective science teachers. While experimental group received the mathematical modeling oriented instruction, control group received traditional instruction. Conceptual understanding test and Operational Achievement Test were given to all groups as a pre-test and post-test. Observations, interviews and working sheets were implemented as other instruments for collecting data. After instruction, ANCOVA was used to analyze the quantitative data. Inductive thematic analyse was used to analyze prospective science teachers? interviews and deductive analyse was used to analyse prospective science teachers? observations. Working sheets were analyzed using rubric with multiple scales and then answers were categorized. The findings showed that mathematical modeling instruction led to a better acquisition of operational achievement (F(1,42) = 5,48, p< 0,05) and conceptual understanding (F(1,42) =15,32, p< 0,001) as compared to the traditional instruction. After the implementation, it is concluded that prospective science teachers have lack of understanding in terms of basicmathematics knowledge. Besides, it is emerged that there is an increase on prospective science teachers? achievement in terms of recognizing relationship between concepts, gaining deep understanding of concepts and explaining the results. It is recommended that experiments devoted to real world should be done during the implementation, and prospective science teachers should gather real data from this experiments.