Planning Skills of the Prospective Elementary School Teachers in Mathematics Course

Abstract

In this study, it was aimed to analyze mathematics course planning skills of the prospective teachers. Another aim of this study was to investigate predictivity of the prospective teachers’ planning skills towards their professional beliefs. The prospective teachers were asked to plan the micro-lesson to be taught to reveal this aim. The study was carried out with 136 prospective teachers studying as 3^rd graders at a state university.  Lesson plan form was developed as a data collection tool by the researcher. This form consisted of three stages which were before the lesson, during the lesson and after the lesson. The researcher participated in the process, and the lessons were video-recorded. Therefore, observations of the researcher and the video-recordings were used as data collection instruments in this study as well.  The data obtained were analyzed based on content analysis. Findings of the study revealed that the prospective teachers had insufficient and inconsistent planning skills. Furthermore, the prospective teachers were even not aware of their behaviors. It was observed that the prospective teachers did not pay enough attention to mathematical language, to mathematical skills and to mathematical expressions and their levels of awareness on this matter were quite low.