Examining the Image of Prospective Teachers towards Mathematicians

The aim of this study is to identify how prospective teachers see mathematicians by the pictures they visualized. In accordance with this purpose phenomenology pattern which is one of the qualitative patterns was used. The study was carried out with 160 volunteered prospective teachers. The data collection tool to be used in this study consists of four parts. The first part includes questions to determine demographic characteristics of prospective teachers, second part include drawing box prepared to define images of prospective teachers towards mathematicians and open ended questions towards describing drawing, third part includes the presented options to define the image sources towards mathematicians and the fourth part includes open-ended questions to determine famous mathematicians and reasons. The images of mathematicians were analyzed by the content analyses method. When the findings of this study are examined it might be concluded that the thought of prospective teachers towards mathematicians are positive. it was determined that the prospective teachers generally perceived mathematician as with glasses, groomed, tall, spilled hairy, apronous, suited, smiling, bellied and scattered haired. When famous mathematicians are examined according to program differences, it is very important that the majority of the mathematicians on the tablature are shown by the mathematics teacher candidates and that one-third of the class teacher candidates do not recognize any famous mathematicians. It is believed that the results from at the end of the study will be helpful to training of classroom and mathematics teacher.