Abstract:
This study aims to investigate the differences emerged from undergraduate education
in Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) of secondary school mathematics
teacher candidates. For this purpose, MKI-S (Mathematics Knowledge Instrument for
Preservice Secondary Mathematics Teachers) which is the Turkish translated version
of TEDS-M secondary items was used. 125 freshman and 95 senior teacher candidates
who study in secondary school teaching mathematics program and mathematics
department were participated to the study. Teacher candidates’ performances were
compared according to years of study to examine the effect of undergraduate
education on MKT; and according to departments to discover the differences of
undergraduate education programs. The differences between groups were analyzed
by using independent sample t-test if the assumptions were met and by using MannWhitney
U test if the assumption were violated. The findings indicate that
undergraduate education may make difference in MKT for both departments. When
senior students were compared according to their departments, in terms of MKT
students from teaching mathematics program are better than students from
mathematics department MKT, but for pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) there is
not a significant difference. With the findings regarding to PCK, in this article the
nature of PCK, its development and the challenges to measure PCK were also
discussed.
