The Differences Between the Lecturers' and the Students' Definitions That They Formed in the Course and the Reasons of These Differences

Abstract

In this study, it was aimed to test whether there were differences and failures between the
definitions that lecturers desired to form in students’ minds and the definitions that students described, and if so,
to investigate the reasons of those differences and failures based on the fundamental topologic concepts topic
from students’ perspectives. A case study research design was adopted in the study and it was conducted with 99
students of elementary mathematics teaching department. The data were gathered via three ways, “Knowledge
Test”, “Unstructured Focus Group Interview” and “Structured Interview Form”, and were analyzed with
descriptive and content analysis methods. As a result, it was observed that there were considerably big
differences between the formal definitions of that the lecturers used in teaching and the definitions defined by the
students. According to the students, these differences and failures stemmed from following reasons: students’
living difficulties in stating their ideas with the mathematical language, their prior learning habits, their negative
ideas about the necessity of the concepts, their lecturers’ use of the language, their lecturers’ neglecting
individual differences in teaching, their poor working habits and abstractness of the topics