Pre-Service Teacher-Generated Analogies for Function Concepts

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to determine pre-service teacher-generated analogies in teaching function concepts and then to discuss them in terms of the content validity - whether analogies used are epistemologically appropriate to illustrate the essence and the properties of the functions as well as the structural relations between the analogues and the targeted concepts. The videotaped data of five pre-service teachers' were collected from their microteaching during "Practice Teaching in Secondary Education" course. Results revealed that pre-service teachers did not consider too much on their analogical models. So they generally failed to make effective transformations between the analogies and the target concepts.