Abstract:

This study aimed to reveal elementary science and mathematics pre-service teachers’ perceptions and experiences on misconceptions. To what extent pre-service teachers are aware of students’ misconceptions, and what they experienced about identifying and working with misconceptions were of interest for this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 pre-service teachers from elementary science education and mathematics education programs. The results revealed that pre-service teachers had awareness on nature of misconceptions while having difficulties in providing more concise definitions of misconceptions. The misconceptions were mostly realized while giving additional examples compared to students’ explanation during teaching learning process. Another finding showed pre-service teachers believed that misconceptions might lead to academic underachievement, can have impact on other topics, can create negative symptoms of psychology, and classroom management problems. The findings were further structured into a SWOT analysis framework that can help future researchers

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