Abstract:

The selection of examples used in the teaching process drags the teacher into a complex and difficult struggle as it requires consideration of many factors. Teacher candidates' knowledge of the use and types of examples during their teaching education and receiving relevant training will help them to choose the examples more consciously they will use in their future lessons. In addition, it is important to reveal the existing knowledge of secondary school mathematics teacher candidates currently studying at universities by determining their thoughts about examples, to identify misconceptions, if any, and to develop solution suggestions for this. For this reason, this study aimed to determine the thoughts of secondary school mathematics teacher candidates about the concept of example. The case study method, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the research. The participants of the research consist of 34 teacher candidates studying in the second year of the secondary school mathematics teaching program at a state university. The data of the research was collected with a semi-structured interview form prepared by the researchers in the spring semester of the 2020-2021 academic year. The data were analyzed using the content analysis technique. As a result of the research, it was determined that teacher candidates did not have enough knowledge about the concept of example. It was determined that the participants had partial knowledge about the intended use of the sample but did not have sufficient knowledge about the types of examples. At the same time, it was concluded that most teacher candidates did not know the difference between the concepts of example and question.

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