Pre-service elementary teachers' understandings of graphs
Date
2011Source Title
Eurasia: Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education
Print ISSN
1305-8215
Publisher
Eurasia Publishing House
Volume
7
Issue
1
Pages
3 - 14
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
219
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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.