Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education

39-59

Authors: Çağla Toprak, Işıkhan Uğurel, Gökçe Tuncer

Today- when the influence of the alteration movement done in order to keep up with the age of the educational system is still continuing- the importance of teachers in students’ learning and achieving what is expected from the education system has been stated by the studies conducted (Hazır & Bıkmaz, 2006). Teachers own a critical role in the stage of both preparing teaching materials and using them (Stein & Smith, 1998b; Swan, 2007). When the existing curriculums –in particular, maths and geometry cirriculums- are analyzed, it can be observed that activities are the most significant teaching materials (Bozkurt, 2012). In fact, it is possible to characterize the existing curriculums as activity-based ones (Report of Workshop Examining Content of Primary School Curriculums According to Branches, 2010; Epö, 2005). Therefore, what sort of learning activities there are, what qualities they need to have, how to design and apply them are topics that must be elaborated (Uğurel et al., 2010). At this point, our study to increase the skills of pre-service teachers during the process of developing activities was conducted with 27 pre-service teachers -19 girls 8 boys- studying in the 4th year in Mathematics Education Department at a state university in the Aegean Region. The activity designs the pre-service teachers developed considering the patterns given after a series of practice were analyzed in documents in terms of the aim of design and the form of practice. As a result of the studies, it is observed that pre-service teachers deal with the topics from the maths curriculum and these topics are of different grade levels. The result of the examination named as target component suggests that activities developed aim firstly at providing learning and this is followed by reinforcing the concepts already learned. It is stated that pre-service teachers prefer mostly small group (cooperative) studies in the activities they develop. Key Words: Learning activity, mathematics learning activity, pre-service teachers of mathematics, mathematics education.

73-88

Authors: Sare Şengül, Hande Gülbağcı Dede

Number sense involves efficient strategies and the ability to think flexibly with numbers and number operations and flexible thinking ability and the inclination getting for making sound mathematical judgements. The aim of this study was to investigate the strategies used by mathematics teachers while solving number sense problems. Eleven mathematics teachers from a graduate program in education were the participants. A number sense test which has a total of 12 problems is used as the data gathering tool. Teachers’ responses and strategies were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, participants’ responses were evaluated for correctness. Then the strategies teachers used were analyzed. The strategies were categorized as based on the use of number sense or rule based strategies. When the correct and incorrect responses were considered together, in the 46% of the responses number sense strategies were used and in 54% the rule-based strategies were used. The results of this study showed that even though teachers can use number sense strategies at some level, there is still room for development in teachers’ number sense. Key Words: Number sense, number sense strategies, mathematics teachers