An investigation of first year elementary mathematics education students? content knowledge about definitions of certain planar geometrical concepts and their shapes

In this thesis, we investigate first year elemantary mathematics education students? content knowledge about certain planar geometrical concepts, definitions and their shapes. During this research we consider a sample of 151 first year students at a university which is located in the southern region of Turkey. In order to collect data, a form including geometrical concepts was utilized. First year students were asked to write a formal definition and then to draw the shape of these geometrical concepts. In this research, only the answers to planar geometrical concepts were used. Data were analyzed qualitatively. Results indicate that some definitions were written in a hierarchical way. Most of the definitions provided by the participants can be regarded as partly true. In other words, they failed to give complete formal definitions. On the other hand, some of the participants? drawings of planar geometrical concepts were incomplete or wrong. The number of correct drawings were much higher than that of correct definitions in overall. Moreover, some of the participants' language usage in the definitions was inattentive, ambiguous and not consistent with mathematical terminology. We think that the incorrect or partly true answers indicate that there is a significant insufficiency in participants? content knowledge regarding planar geometric concepts.