International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The purpose of the study was to determine preservice middle school mathematics teachers’ misconceptions
for constructing histograms.
METHOD
In order to determine histogram misconceptions of the preservice middle school mathematics teachers, a
previously collected data used. The data was originally collected as a part of the thesis project (Mercimek, 2013)
that is conducted to assess content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of preservice middle school
mathematics teachers. An item in this thesis project constructed to measure histogram knowledge of preservice
mathematics teachers.
This item requires preservice teachers to construct a histogram from an extra ordinary data. Data presented in
item was consisted of values that had one decimal point. Our experience with statistics textbooks indicated that
histogram construction examples generally use data that are consisted of integers. Since the procedures in these
examples described for integers, this item requires preservice teachers to think thoroughly the logic behind
histogram construction, and to extend their histogram knowledge for the data that includes decimal points. The
translated version of the Item presented in Figure 1.
A teacher wanted students to collect data to construct histogram. A student wanted to use the weights of
students in her classroom as data so she brought a digital scale from her house. Then she measured weight of
30 students using this digital scale. The table shows the measurements of these 30 students. (unit is
kilogram)
Using this data, construct a histogram that has 5 intervals.
Figure 1. Translated version of the histogram item
Participants of the thesis project are third and fourth year preservice mathematics teachers who will be
eligible to teach in middle schools from fifth grade to eighth grade. All of these preservice teachers also took
Statistics and Probability course in their first semester of third year in the mathematics teacher program. Even
though 489 preservice middle school mathematics teachers from eight different public universities replied this
item in thesis project, only answers that have clear indication of histogram misconception selected for the
analysis of this study.
RESULTS
Qualitative analysis preservice teachers’ answers revealed several important findings. Some of these
preservice teachers constructed a graph that is completely different from histogram. For example, some students
draw a scatterplot that shown at Figure 2. These students interpreted data as bivariate and used one axis for data
presented in Item. They used another axis either for the data point itself or for the order of corresponding data
point. This interpretation resulted in a data that looked similar to
or
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