Eric.ed.gov – Some Reflections from Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’ Practice Teaching on the Area of Understanding Data in the Math-Teaching Course

With developing technology statistical information and data sources become a very important issues and from primary school it has become necessary to gain the skills for making interpreting and making sense of data. These skills consist of collecting information, arrangement and analysis of collected data and the interpretation of the results. The duty of guiding students in their process of making statistical information meaningful falls upon teachers. This study, whose aim was to investigate prepared course content for sub-learning area in grade 1-4 math course and obtained experiences by pre-service elementary teachers in the schools they went as a part of teaching practice course, was conducted with nine fourth-year students attending an undergraduate program of elementary teaching in a state university during 2013-2014 academic year. Pre-service teachers were each asked to prepare and conduct a lesson plan suitable for the lesson outcomes and the level of the classes that they were to teach. Their applications were assessed by semi-structured observation form about data teaching developed by the researchers. It was observed that pre-service teachers could not reflect given lesson outcomes on the topic of data to the lessons they prepared to teach during their teaching practice. In the implementations, it was noted that pre-service teachers could not effectively include students in both collecting and arrangement as well as interpretation processes of the information and that they taught in teacher-centered manner although they prepared a correct activity. It was also noted that pre-service teachers could not well enough differentiate category and concept of variable in table and graph activities.