Determining preservice elementary teachers? mathemetical conceptions according to cK¢ theory

The questions like what happens in students? mind, how they construct and use knowledge have always been hot issues for researchers. There have been numerous studies pursuing this inquiry with various theoretical frameworks. Conception and misconception concepts have been two structures used in such studies and researches have mainly focused on misconceptions. Although determining misconceptions in students? mind has an important role in understanding what is happening in their minds, it can be said that it is not fully practical.Because mathematics has innumerable concepts and there will be a huge list of misconceptions about each concept. On the other hand when we consider that misconceptions students bear have potential to be the trace of certain understanding or meaning conception, determining conceptions students face at divers subjects is obviously necessary.Having stated the theoretical framework the aim of this study is to determine and investigate mathematics course knowledge of pre-service elementary school teachers with regard to the conception model of the cK¢ theory. The data of the study were collected with the examinations and clinical interviews conducted with pre-service teachers. In this study adopting a descriptive qualitative research method; 61 preservice teachers were tested with examinations prepared on Sets, Equations, Functions and Numbers topics and 26 of them were interviewed. The examinations applied were analyzed in detail and any types of knowledge used by the candidate teachers while solving the questions were determined. The mathematical understanding of the candidate teachers was determined by categorizing this related knowledge, which is called ?operator? in the conception stage of cK¢ theory.In the end, the conceptions of the preservice elementary teachers were divided under 10 titles whenever they could be expressed as; to reach solution with the shortest way possible, even it is wrong (pragmatic thinking), applying a property that is solving one case for a newly faced situation (knowledge transfer), making generalizations based on limited numbers of examples (partial generalization). When these conceptions were compared with the literature, some of these conceptions have existed in the previous studies with various names; some others have been identified in this study for the first time.