Abstract:

The study aimed to determine possible difficulties of pre-service elementary teachers in creating daily-life stories about line graphs. It was conducted with 80 pre-service teachers studying in the final year of an Elementary Teacher Education Program at a university in eastern Turkey. The three-item Story Construction Test developed about line graphs was used as the data collection instrument. It was found that the pre-service teachers had certain difficulties in constructing daily-life stories suitable for line graphs. The pre-service teachers had the most difficulty in translating the continuous change in the graphs to the stories they constructed. In addition, other difficulties were noted in the pre-service teachers such as inability to convey the starting value in the graph to the story, inability to represent linear change (increase or decrease), inability to represent the breaking points in the graph, and inability to convey the ending value in the graph to the story in the stories where continuous change was represented.

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