The analysis of prospective elementary scool teachers misconceptions Regarding Basic Mathematics I and II courses

The present study aims at determining the subjects that the prospective primary school teachers have difficulty in learning in the mathematics courses that they take as undergraduate courses before starting the profession and determining the possible misconceptions in a subject chosen from the ones that they have less difficulty in learning.The present study is a literature review and was realized in two phases. The participants of the study were determined with convenience sampling, which is one of the oriented sampling methods. The participants of the first phase were composed of 381 sophomores from four different universities coded as A, B, C and D in 2007-2008 academic year, and the second phase of the study was composed of 53 juniors from the universities A and D in 2008-2009 academic year.To determine the subjects that the prospective teachers have difficulty in learning Basic Mathematics I-II Subject Difficulty Determination Survay consisting of the subjects in Basic Mathematics I-II courses was applied. Depending on the findings obtained and considering the subjects that the participants had the least difficulty, Misconceptions Determination Questions on the Subject `Fractions? was applied. In addition, before and after the application of the mentioned scale, Difficulty Determination Survay for the Subject Fractions involving the sub-titles of the fractions was applied. All of the survays and questions were formed by researcher with expert opinion.Content analysis method, one of the qualitative analysis methods, Excel and SPSS package program were used for data analysis. Depending on the results obtained from the analysis of the data, it was found out that numbers, definition of mathematics and its relation with the other sciences are among the subjects that the prospective primary school teachers find the easiest. On the other hand, continuous and discontinuous functions, analytical analysis distribution sizes/scales/measurement of the circle and line ?one of the concerns of analytical geometry- and trigonometry were found out to have the highest difficulty index. Based on the findings of the survay applied on the subject `fractions? which is a sub-title of the subject `numbers?, it can be said that prospective primary school teachers are not good enough in comprehending the meaning of a fraction, arithmetical operations with fractions and the illustration of these operations with models. The most important finding obtained from the Difficulty Determination Survay for the Subject Fractions was the change in the prospective teachers? beliefs about teaching and learning the fractions in a way that they started to find fractions difficult after facing open-ended questions about the subject.