Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’
Understandings of Graphs
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1
Bilkent University, Ankara, TURKEY
2
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
3
Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
4
Texas State University-San Marcos, San Marcos, Texas, USA
Publication date: 2011-06-21
EURASIA J. Math., Sci Tech. Ed 2011;7(1):3-14
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Choosing graphs to display quantitative information is a component of graph sense. An
important aspect of pre-service elementary teachers’ content knowledge; ability to choose
appropriate graphs in applied contexts is investigated in this study. They were given three
scenarios followed by four graphs representing the same quantitative data. They rated the
appropriateness of each graph and indicated the reasons for their choices. Results showed
that pre-service elementary teachers can recognize the situations appropriate for bar
graphs, pie charts, and line graphs and match the suitable graphs to these situations.
However, they had limited knowledge of scatterplots and did not recognize the situations
for which they are typically used. Implications of findings for elementary pre-service
teacher education programs are drawn.