Mathematical Strengths, Difficulties and Misconceptions of Teachers : Analysis of Their Performance in an Achievement Test 【Article】

Identifying teachers' strengths and weaknesses is of crucial importance for the design of in-servicetraining activities aimed at improving the teaching/learning process. In this connection, this paper pre-sents an examination of teachers' performance in an achievement test. It presents an analysis of theteachers' common strengths, difficulties and misconceptions as reflected in how they went about identi-fying, analyzing and dealing with mathematical concepts in a given problem. Also, it points out thecommon areas in mathematics where the teachers significantly made improvement after participating inthe training program.After a careful investigation of the teachers' working papers in the achievement tests, the researcheralso found out that the misconceptions learners have surrounding a mathematical concept contributelargely to their difficulty in dealing with that concept. This confirms Rosnicks (1981) finding in hisstudy that focused on the students' ability to translate English sentence into algebraic expressions, andvice versa.