Abstract:

– The aim of this study is to reveal the perceptions of preservice mathematics teachers on the concepts of infinity, indeterminate and undefined. The study was conducted with 83 teacher candidates attending to Primary School Mathematics Education at a state-owned university. A two-part test was applied to preservice teachers. In the first part of the test, three questions were directly posed to preservice teachers to clarify what they understand the concepts of infinity, indeterminate, and undefined. In the second part of the test, nine cases representing infinity, indeterminate and undefined (∞+∞, 1∞ and 1/0 etc.) were given to the teacher candidates and they were asked to explain what these symbolic representations mean to them. Based on the data obtained from the test, the candidate teachers (23%) has been more successful in explaining the concept of indeterminate. Except for the concept of undefined, their daily life experiences were seem to be effective to their explanations about the other two concepts. It was also determined that preservice teachers substitute these three concepts to each other. Besides, the study concluded that previously learned some dominant rules were quite effective to teacher’ candidates' decisions of the about given symbolical cases

Keywords: