Analysis of the problems posed by pre-service primary school teachers with the context of environment

Abstract

The current study is an inter-disciplinary study in which the problems posed by pre-service primary school teachers were analyzed within the context of both environment and mathematical processes. A total of 75 pre-service primary school teachers participated in the current study designed according to the case study design, one of the qualitative research methods. The data were collected through the math problems posed by the pre-service were analyzed by using the content analysis method while the problem posing processes were analyzed through the descriptive analysis approach. The results of the analyses have revealed that the pre-service teachers generally preferred to include more than one environmental context in the problems they posed and from among these contexts, the waste, garbage, forestation and air pollution contexts came to the fore. It was found that the problems posed were solvable to a great extent and were mostly real life problems in accordance with the structure of the context. However, it was observed that more than 30% of pre-service teachers could not correctly express the grade level of primary school in terms of both mathematical processes and the environmental context.