Examination of secondary school mathematics teacher candidates' content knowledge of graphics

This study aimed to examine secondary school mathematics teacher candidates' content knowledge regarding graphics. In this context, the content knowledge required for teaching data processing subjects (bar graph, line graph, pie graph) at the middle school level was defined and this knowledge of the prospective teachers was examined. In the research, multiple case studies, one of the qualitative research designs, were adopted. 25 senior primary school mathematics teaching students studying at Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University participated in the research. Participants were determined using the appropriate sampling method. As a result of the research, it was seen that prospective teachers defined the concepts related to graphs incompletely and could not establish the relationship between the concepts appropriately. It was also observed that they had difficulty in determining the appropriate graphic according to the context. For example, it has been observed that they prefer bar graphs in situations where line graphs are suitable. Therefore, it was determined that the context of the problem was not taken into consideration. It was observed that some teacher candidates did not name the axes during the graphs creation process. Some of teacher candidates ignored the scaling of the axes at certain intervals and focused on the given values. It was determined that most of the teacher candidates did not name the graph after drawing it. It was observed that some of the teacher candidates drew the columns together in the bar graphs. Also they could not understand the difference between the bar graphs and histogram. In the findings regarding the pie graph, it was determined that some of the teacher candidates had difficulty in creating circle slices. For example, it was observed that they had difficulty finding the angles of the circle segments in the data set whose frequencies were given. In addition to these results, it was observed that some of the teacher candidates had difficulty reading through the data. It was also observed that they had difficulty making comparisons between different data. In general, it was determined that teacher candidates had deficiencies in their field knowledge of graphics.