8th Grade Mathematics Subjects within the Scope of TIMSS: The Opinions of Prospective Mathematics Teachers

Article History: Received 21.09.2014 Received in revised form 16.02.2015 Accepted 25.02.2015 Available online 27.03.2015 The purpose of TIMSS which is an international project is to evaluate mathematics and science achievement of students on the basis of countries with programs, teaching methods and schools. It is known that we do not have satisfactory results from this examination. For this reason, teaching mathematics subject within the scope of the project, the opinions of teachers, students and prospective teachers on the difficulties and solution strategies of this process and solution strategies are important for having satisfactory results. In this sense, the purpose of this study is to find out the opinions of prospective primary mathematics teachers on the 8th grade mathematics subject within the scope of TIMSS. Besides, the aim is to determine the difficulties that prospective teachers think that they will encounter during the process of conducting lessons on these subjects and to determine solution strategies for these stated difficulties. The study which is designed according to these purposes is a qualitative study which is organized according to the phenemology design and in which document analysis technique is used. The study group is consisted of 99 third and fourth year prospective mathematics teachers in Kocaeli University, Education Faculty. Document analysis method was selected in this study. Opinion form which was validated in accordance with an expert’s opinions and developed by the researcher, included 8 open-ended questions and was used for document analysis. Prospective teachers were given 25 minutes for filling opinions forms during data collection process. The obtained data were evaluated with content analysis. In conclusion, it was appeared that prospective teachers stated that they would not have difficulties in teaching the subject of ‘Numbers’ but they would have difficulties in teaching the subjects of ‘Algebra’, ‘Geometry’ and ‘ Data and Chance’. The difficulties were stated as in the following; difficulties coming from students, not knowing how to teach the subject and having abstract subjects. The solution strategies were stated as in the following; solving plenty of relevant examples, carrying out activities, using material and modelling/concretization. © 2015 IOJES. All rights reserved