EXAMINING PRE-SERVICE MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE OF NUMBER PATTERNS WITH REGARD TO TOPIC-SPECIFIC STRATEGIES

The concept of “patterns” is now a part of the curriculum for grade 1 through grade 8 as a result of the recent reform in the elementary mathematics curriculum in Turkey. Since it is a newly-introduced concept in the curriculum, pre-service teachers do not have learning experiences of “patterns”. This brings the following question into consideration: Do pre-service teachers have adequate knowledge to teach “number patterns”? This study investigates six pre-service elementary teachers’ use of strategies to teach number patterns during micro-teaching lessons. Shulman’s (1986) notion of “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK) and Magnusson et al.’s (1999) notion of “topic-specific strategies” component of PCK are used as the theoretical framework. The obtained data has indicated four categories of strategies: ‘examining the relationship between consecutive numbers’, ‘preparing tables of values, ‘constructing models’, ‘trial and error’. It has also been found out that pre-service teachers have had difficulties in finding the rules of “patterns” reported in the literature.