Pre-service elementary school teachers' awareness of posing mathematical pseudo-problems

Abstract

This study aimed to expose pre-service elementary school teachers' awareness of selecting and using real-life context in the problems they posed. The participants of this study were asked to create mathematical problems. The findings showed that some of the participants were more focused on the mathematical concepts and procedures, but tended to ignore the contexts of the problems proposed. As a result, they created problems using numbers and stories that are not relevant to everyday life or are termed pseudo-problems. Some of the real-problems submitted by the participants were not based on an awareness of problem-context relevance.