Pre-service Class Teachers’ Feelings about Graphs

Abstract

Nowadays, reading and understanding the data is one of basic indicators to becoming an active and thoughtful citizen. These skills, also defined as numerical literacy, contribute meaningful and permanent learning via making connections between courses and subjects. In this view, Graphs are one of the forefront learning domains. Graphs are also frequently used in the education because of their ability to visualize numerical data. Whilst Graphs are considered a subject of mathematics, they are actually interdisciplinary subject and used in science, life and social studies and Turkish. The attitude of class teachers towards graphics is important as they are responsible to teach these courses in the first four grades. In the literature, although there are some studies on the knowledge levels of pre-service class teachers, there is a gap, especially in national literature, on the attitudes of them towards graphs. Being a part of study on developing an attitude instrument, this study aims at determining of the feelings of pre-service class teachers about graphs. For these purposes, 160 pre-service class teachers in fourth grade enrolled in a national university were asked an open ended question of “What do you feel when you face with a graph?” Data were collected in the second semester of instructional year of 2012-2013. Most of the pre-service class teachers feel that graphs will increase their undestanding and interpreting ability and they feel the necesssity of interpreting the graphs when they face with.