Mathematics Student Teachers’ Misconceptions on the Limit and Continuity Concepts

Content knowledge is one of the important components of teacher training and has attracted particular interest of many mathematics educators. One of the most important variables which can be used to determinate teachers’ content knowledge of any topic is their misconceptions related to this topic. The aim of this study is to investigate student teachers’ misconceptions related to the limit and continuity concept. To gather data, we administered a questionnaire which composed of open and closed-ended questions to 37 teacher candidates studying in Secondary School Mathematics Education. Obtained data were analysed by using qualitative and quantitative analysis methods. The results show that the student teachers have some misconceptions concerning the limit and continuity concept e.g. if a function has limit at a point, it should be defined and continuous at that point, if the graph of a function is not in one piece, it is not continuous. At the same time, some student teachers have difficulties in distinguishing the notion of ambiguity from that of indefiniteness.