Investigation of teacher-candidates' level of knowledge and their misconceptions with content analysis

This research uncovers the level of knowledge and misconceptions of summer period state university students on the themes of 'unit conversion and dimensional analysis'. Accordingly, there are no teacher-candidates expressing that a constant quantity can have a unit. However, within the results of a study conducted on senior students at department of physics; Kaplan et al., (2014) predicate the rate of answers to the same questions as 58.06%. Responses by teacher-candidates related to that a constant quantity cannot have a unit, were given with partial or misunderstanding with a rate of 18.19%. When compared, these results show partial resemblance to the results of Kaplan et al., (2014). Success is few or none as can be understood from the analyses of the two unit conversion-themed questions. The rate of misunderstanding of prefixes used in units and their conversion remains at 43.93%. Misunderstanding of the question related to expression of a result in another particular unit was 69.69%. The study conducted for determining the opinion and knowledge of high school students on units in chemistry classes in 2007 by Yıldırım & İlhan brought them to the conclusion that the students had problems and did not know well about units due to 65% negative (disagree + completely disagree) response results given to the 4th sentence which was "... score should be deducted if the answer in exams does not indicate any unit". Detected at high school level, this ratio is roughly the same at bachelor's degree especially with teacher-candidates. Level of understanding is also very low in the analysis of the other two questions themed dimensional analysis.
Some of the misconceptions uncovered by this research are: conversion through incorrect multiplier during unit conversion, the attempt to reach the result that is asked in a particular unit without performing any conversion operations, lack of knowledge on SI base quantities, confusion of derived quantities with base quantities, use of minus sign during dimensional analysis, and the attempt to determine proportional constants via dimensional analysis.

Considering the results obtained from this study, it can be suggested that classes could employ a quality technique so as to eliminate conceptual delusions due to serious lack of knowledge by math teacher-candidates on units and dimensional analysis, and the presence of various conceptual delusions. Analogies can be used with new learning or to stimulate conceptual change by comparing situations that learners understand to other situations they misunderstand (Stavy, 1991). Cooperative learning is also one instrument for stimulating student-student interactions and learning. Further research on the topic of units is highly recommended due to the short numbers of researches in technical literature under this field.