Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’ Understandings of Graphs
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Cengiz Alacaci 1 * , Scott Lewis 2, George E. O’Brien 3, Zhonghong Jiang 4
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1 Bilkent University, Ankara, TURKEY
2 Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
3 Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
4 Texas State University-San Marcos, San Marcos, Texas, USA
* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Choosing graphs to display quantitative information is a component of graph sense. An important aspect of pre-service elementary teachers’ content knowledge; ability to choose appropriate graphs in applied contexts is investigated in this study. They were given three scenarios followed by four graphs representing the same quantitative data. They rated the appropriateness of each graph and indicated the reasons for their choices. Results showed that pre-service elementary teachers can recognize the situations appropriate for bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs and match the suitable graphs to these situations. However, they had limited knowledge of scatterplots and did not recognize the situations for which they are typically used. Implications of findings for elementary pre-service teacher education programs are drawn.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.12973/ejmste/75171

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, 2011 - Volume 7 Issue 1, pp. 3-14

Publication date: 21 Jun 2011

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