Prospective mathematics teachers abilities’ to construct relations between the different representations of series with complex terms

AbstractThis study tried to investigate the prospective mathematics teachers’ abilities to construct relations between the symbolic and visual representations of series with complex terms. The sample was composed of 80 prospective mathematics teachers who were in their last grade of their undergraduate degree. There were two parallel tests to conduct this study. It was aimed at visually explaining the manner of the partial sum of series with complex terms in the first part of the study and, in the second part, at constructing the general term of the series with the help of the visually given the sum of it. Research indicated that participants’ success in the transition from the visual to symbolic representation was statistically low. Specifically, participants faced difficulty in visualization of the symbolic representation of partial sums of the series with the complex terms. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd