Investigation of mathematical association skills and mathematical association self-efficiencies of math teacher candidates

This study aims to examine pre-service mathematics teachers mathematical association self-efficacy and how they make the seassociations. For this purpose, the study was carried out in the form of mixed research, which allows the different cases of there search to be examined and expanded by different methods. There search was conducted with 50 pre-service mathematics teachers who took the Association in Mathematics Teaching course at a state university in the 2021-2022 academic year. The participants of the quantitative research of the study were determined by the convenient sampling method, which is one of the non-probability sampling methods, andtheparticipants of the qualitative part were determined by the purposive sampling method. The Mathematical Association Self-Efficacy Scale (Özgen & Bindak 2018) was used forquantitative data. To examine the difference between the pre-test applied before the mathematics teacher candidates took the Association in Mathematics Teaching course and the post-test applied after taking the course, quantitative analysis was conducted using the Dependent Sample t-Test. In the qualitative aspect of the research, lesson plans prepared by the pre-service teachers and interviews with the pre-service teachers were used. The application was carried out with twelve mathematics teacher candidates, taking into account the difference between the pre-test and post-test scores. The data obtained from the interview sand lesson plans were analyzed by content analysis. As a qualitativere search design, a case study was used to reveal pre-service mathematics teachers' experiences of mathematical association according to the types of associations. As a result of the analysis, it was seen that there was a difference between the score sobtained from the Mathematical Association Scale applied by the pre-service mathematics teachers before and after taking theAssociation in Mathematics Teaching course, and this difference was in favor of the post-test. When the pre-service teachers interviewed were analyzed considering associating with daily life, associating with different disciplines, associating mathematics with in itself, and associating it with different forms of representation, it was seen that they used associating with daily life more easily than other types of association. They stated that they had difficulty associating with different disciplines. When a general examination was made, it was seen that they talked about the importance of all types of association.