Reflection of Preservice Teachers’ Thoughts about Connecting Mathematics and Real Life Situations on Their Mathematics Learning Activities

Abstract

The importance of constructing connections has been emphasized in many academic works, learning models, standards and teaching programs that illuminates teaching and learning of mathematics. In addition to the connection, the importance of a learning unit which is named as activity has been emphasized in many recent works and thoughts related to teaching and learning of mathematics. This situation moves the activities and activity based learning into the center of mathematics education. In mathematics education, mathematics learning activities are the most appropriate learning unit that could be construct connections with it. In this context, it is thought that it would be beneficial to explain what the connection is and how to construct connection using the existing or developed activities. The main purpose of this study is to identify pre-service secondary mathematics teachers’ (PSMTs) thoughts about what the real life connection is and how this connection could be constructed, and to examine how PSMTs reflected their thoughts on a group of mathematics learning activities that are connected with real life situations. In this work, the case study, which is one of the qualitative research paradigms, was used. The study was conducted with 33 (11 group) PSMTs who had been educated for 4th years in a public university. The PMSTs were asked to write free writings related to what the real life connection is and how to construct real life connections and to develop mathematics learning activities that are connected with real life situations. The collected data was analyzed using content analysis method. It is found that while PSMTs defended the necessity and importance of the real life connection, they had difficulty in reflecting this on mathematics learning activities.