Teachers' interactions with mathematically gifted students in the classroom environment, and the elements of this interaction have become prominent recently. This qualitative study's purpose is to reveal the views of prospective secondary mathematics teachers about these interactions. The study participants were seven prospective teachers attending the fourth year of a secondary mathematics teaching programme in a public university in Turkey during the 2018-2019 academic year. These prospective teachers participated in a 90-minute focus group interview which was recorded with a video camera. During the interview, the researcher brought up possible classroom environment scenarios that could occur with mathematically gifted students who may have the characteristics that the participants described. The prospective teachers' views about the kinds of behaviours they can exhibit, and what methods they can reveal in these theoretical interactions were analysed with the descriptive analysis method. The study results indicated that the participants exhibited different approaches to situations they might encounter in the classroom. For example, some prospective mathematics teachers asserted that mathematically gifted students should be assisted in the classroom context; others stated that such students should be supported with out-of-class activities rather than helping them in the classroom. Besides, the participants suggested that the history of mathematics and advanced mathematics subjects could also be used to educate mathematically gifted students.
The purpose of the study is to investigate prospective mathematics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in their first teaching experience. We collected data during prospective mathematics teachers' school experience course that lasts for 14 weeks. The data for this study was collected through three group discussion interviews during the "school experience" course. We have conducted two classroom observations while prospective students' applied activities during their teaching experience in classrooms. We analyzed the data in accordance with the content analysis. According to the results, besides mainly having knowledge of instructional strategies, the prospective mathematics teachers have limited knowledge of students' thinking.
This study aims to reveal how the embodied cognition of certain geometrical concepts of secondary-school students arises via gestures and what kinds of gestures they produce while engaging with different concepts. The study participants comprised four eleventh-grade students studying at a state high school in Turkey. The study focused on the gestures of students related to angle, a measure of an angle, congruence-similarity, and translation. Data were gathered via video-recorded focus group discussions and individual interviews, and the cognition of the students for each concept was coded using content analysis. According to the research findings, it was found that the deictic gestures of the participants reflect the grounding of cognition in the physical environment; representational gestures manifest mental simulations of action and perception, and some metaphoric gestures reflect body-based conceptual metaphors.
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