Middle school mathematics teachers pedagogical content knowledge regarding teaching strategies on quadrilaterals

Abstract

Pedagogical content knowledge is consisted of two components: student knowledge and teaching strategies. Teaching strategies was defined under two sub-headings as strategies for specific topics and specific strategies for any topic. The purpose of this study was to examine the method with which quadrilaterals were taught by mathematics teachers with regard to the teaching strategies component of pedagogical content knowledge. 30 middle school mathematics teachers working at 12 different schools in Turkey participated in this study. Interview method was used for data acquisition. The interview was intended to put forth the strategies that the teachers used for defining, classification and visualization which were included in the strategies of the framework used for the study. Content analysis was used to analyze the data acquired in this study. Study results showed that the definition strategy was used together with the visualization strategy. It was also determined that informal definitions were used in addition to formal definitions and that in general a personal definition was given by listing the various properties of quadrilaterals. The teachers who participated in this study generally used the partial classification of quadrilaterals and the transformation classification of quadrilaterals.Key words: Pedagogical content knowledge, teaching strategies, quadrilaterals. INTRODUCTIONTeacher education research has been suggested as a new field of study by Shulman (1986) and has created a framework to determine what teachers need and develop effective teaching according to some factors. In this framework, Shulman (1987) has examined pedagogical content knowledge as consisting of two components: student knowledge and teaching strategies. When components of the knowledge to understand students in various different pedagogical content knowledge models are examined (Grossman, 1990;Fennema and Franke, 1992;Schoenfeld, 1998;Magnusson et al., 1999;An et al., 2004;Ball et al., 2008;Park and Oliver, 2008;Kovarik, 2008) it is observed that student knowledge is examined in six different sub-components such as revealing the current knowledge of students, associating preliminary knowledge with new knowledge, valuing *Corresponding author. E-mail: elifnurakdogan@hotmail.com student questions and thoughts, taking into consideration the individual differences, predicting student thought and determining-knowing the misconceptions of students. It is also observed that the teaching strategies component in these models is examined under six different sub-components such as strategies for specific topics, specific strategies for any topics, demonstrations, (examples, real world problems, problems), analogies, illustrations, samplings, explanations.Various researches have carried out on the pedagogical content knowledge components which was put forth by Shulman (Park and Oliver 2008, different components have been listed in detail by different researchers). In this examination, Park and Oliver (2008) have determined that many of these ...