Abstract:

This study aims to investigate the differences emerged from undergraduate education in Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) of secondary school mathematics teacher candidates. For this purpose, MKI-S (Mathematics Knowledge Instrument for Preservice Secondary Mathematics Teachers) which is the Turkish translated version of TEDS-M secondary items was used. 125 freshman and 95 senior teacher candidates who study in secondary school teaching mathematics program and mathematics department were participated to the study. Teacher candidates’ performances were compared according to years of study to examine the effect of undergraduate education on MKT; and according to departments to discover the differences of undergraduate education programs. The differences between groups were analyzed by using independent sample t-test if the assumptions were met and by using Mann-Whitney U test if the assumption were violated. The findings indicate that undergraduate education may make difference in MKT for both departments. When senior students were compared according to their departments, in terms of MKT students from teaching mathematics program are better than students from mathematics department MKT, but for pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) there is not a significant difference. With the findings regarding to PCK, in this article the nature of PCK, its development and the challenges to measure PCK were also discussed. 

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