In- & pre - service elementary school teachers? Van Hiele reasoning stages

The aim of this study was to investigate the reasoning stages of pre- and in-service elementary school teachers in geometry. The number of participants involved in the study was 186. One hundred four were in-service elementary school teachers and eighty two were pre-service elementary school teachers. The study took place in both Afyonkarahisar and Kocatepe University. The researcher used a multiple-choice geometry test to find out the participants? Van Hiele levels. After the collection of the data, the descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and One-Way ANOVA with ? = .05 were used in the analysis of the quantitative data.The study revealed that the pre- and in-service elementary school teachers showed the first four Van Hiele levels, visualization, analysis, ordering and deduction in different percentiles and that there was no difference in terms of reasoning stages between the pre- and in-service elementary school teachers. Moreover, although there was no gender difference found regarding the geometric thinking levels between male and female in-service elementary school teachers, there was a gender difference detected with reference to reasoning stages between male and female pre-service elementary school teachers favoring males. Furthermore, the study showed that having years of teaching experience was not a factor affecting the in-service elementary school teachers? reasoning stages geometry.