Comparative analysis of senior high school prospective mathematics teachers and students’ conceptual misunderstanding in algebra

The aim of this study is to compare the performance and conceptual misunderstanding of senior high school prospective mathematics teachers and students in algebra with an intent to statistically find out whether there is a significance difference in students and prospective teachers’ ability to identify and rectify algebraic conceptual misunderstanding. A test consisting of 21 tasks was used for data collection. A sample of 170 consisting of 60 prospective senior high school mathematics teachers from mathematics education department of University of Education Winneba and 110 senior high school students from four selected senior high schools in Ashanti Region of Ghana. The study employed convenience, purposive, and simple random sampling as sampling techniques. The result showed that the overall performance of prospective teachers and students’ performance on the algebra was generally poor. That is, their ability to identify and rectify algebraic conceptual misunderstanding was poor. However, the prospective teachers’ overall performance was comparatively better than the students. The independent t-test conducted between the prospective teachers and students on the test scores gave the results (mean [M]=20.67, standard deviation [SD]=11.98) for students and (M=33.91, SD=14.78) for prospective teachers with t(168)=-6.32, p=0.00 indicating that statistically there is difference between the mean scores of the two groups signifying that the prospective teacher’s ability to identify and rectify algebraic conceptual misunderstanding outperformed the students.