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Ponte Academic Journal
Mar 2019, Volume 75, Issue 3

AN ANALYSIS OF PRE-SERVICE MATHEMATICS MISTAKES IN MATRICES

Author(s): Zanele Ndlov

J. Ponte - Mar 2019 - Volume 75 - Issue 3
doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2019.3.9



Abstract:
With the crisis faced in mathematics performance in South Africa, teacher-training institutions are urged to produce mathematics teachers who are grounded in the content discipline. Consequence, teacher educators and researchers are paying particular attention to mistakes students make when learning mathematics concepts with the aim to provide appropriate remedial strategies in order to improve students’ content discipline knowledge. In this study, researcher explain mistakes of (n=31) first pre-service mathematics teachers. The data was collected using activity sheets and interviews. The activity sheets was used in order to analyse their written work with the aim to interrogate their responses. Interviews were used in order to interrogate their thought processes of the solution provided. The findings showed that while matrices are considered a concrete concepts, the mistakes displayed by pre-service mathematics teachers are systematics and emanate from underlying belies of working with real numbers. Thus, indicate prevalent errors and misconceptions. The findings further showed that the lack of procedural and conceptual knowledge of computing real numbers was the main source of the identified errors and misconceptions. Based on the findings the recommendations is that in order to help pre-service mathematics teachers build a strong foundation of abstract matrix algebra there is a needy to remedy errors and misconceptions of matrices.
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