Middle School Mathematics Teachers ’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge Regarding Student Knowledge about Quadrilaterals

ABSTRACT: Pedagogical content knowledge is consisted of two components: student knowledge, teaching strategies. Student knowledge was defined to sub-categories as connecting prior knowledge to new knowledge, noticing students ’ mistakes, identifying students ’ difficulties of understanding. The aim of this study is to examine middle school mathematics teachers ’ pedagogical content knowledge in terms of student knowledge regarding quadrilaterals. Interview method was used. 30 middle school mathematics teachers working at 12 different schools in Turkey participated. Content analysis was used. Results show that teachers teach lessons taking into consideration their students ’ previous knowledge and new knowledge they do by “reminding quadrilaterals students previously learnt ” or “making association between similar quadrilaterals. The teachers pointed out the students ’ mistakes about quadrilaterals were group under three headings: mistakes regarding defining quadrilaterals, mistakes regarding visual property, classification of quadrilaterals, and family relation within quadrilaterals. The students ’ difficulties are summarized in two groups: difficulties identified related with trapezoid, difficulties identified related with other quadrilaterals. Different studies can be carried out on different pedagogical content knowledge components to examine the relationship between the results