The Tendency of Turkish Pre-service Teachers’ to Pose Word Problems

Abstract

The aim of this study was to identify the problem posing tendency of preservice teachers (primary and mathematics) in structured problem posing situations. Participants were selected using a two-step sampling process in order to prevent bias. In the first sampling process, a total of 109 pre-service teachers participated in the study. Of these participants, 48 were pre-service primary school mathematics teachers and 61 were pre-service primary teachers who were in their sixth term of school. In the second sampling process, 10 volunteer participants were selected using purposeful sampling. It was found that participants had a tendency to pose result-centered problems (contextually inappropriate and irrelevant result-focused problems) and context-centered problems (standard and non-standard word problems). In some cases, participants did not pose any word problems.Keywords: Problem posing, structured problem posing, word problem, pre-service primary mathematics teacher, pre-service primary teacher