Examining pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge on fractions in terms of students’ errors

The aim of this study was to examine pre-service classroom teachers’ knowledge of students in order to understand students’ errors and their instructional written explanations to eliminate these errors. In this context, the participants of the study were composed of 69 pre-service classroom teachers who were studying in the Kazım Karabekir Faculty of Education at Atatürk University and were selected via the purposive sampling method from among the non-random sampling methods. Accordingly, the case study method, which is based on the qualitative research approach, was used in the study. The answers given by secondary school students to the open-ended questions on fractions in the study of Soylu and Soylu (2005) were used as the data collection tool in the study. Incorrect answers of the students were given to the pre-service teachers in written form and the pre-service classroom teachers were requested to find the errors in these questions and correct these incorrect answers. The data obtained from the answers of the pre-service classroom teachers were analysed using the content analysis technique. The results of the study showed that the pre-service classroom teachers generally did not experience much difficulty in identifying the students’ errors related to the operations in fractions and, to a certain extent; they correctly detected the students’ errors. Conversely, it was observed from the obtained data that the instructional explanations of the pre-service teachers for the question on how to correct students’ errors were not at an adequate level.

Pedagogical content knowledge ,

fractions ,

error ,

pre-service teacher ,