The Relationship Between the Materials Prepared by Prospective Primary School Mathematics Teachers with Values Set Out in the Curriculum

This study aims to determine prospective primary education mathematics teachers’ views on the “root values” available in the mathematics curriculum and to reveal some of the practices they actualise on the basis of the views. Within this scope, the study aims to unveil the prospective teachers’ views on “values education in mathematics” and on “values education through materials design” and the meaning they attribute to the values available in mathematics curriculum, also to determine the value that they consider the most important, to examine the resultant concrete products when the material development process and the value education process are carried out together, and finally to analyse their feelings in this process. The study group was composed of 56 prospective teachers. Document analysis, interviews and literature review were employed; and the data were put to content analysis. Consequently, it was found that the prospective teachers had positive views about instilling values in students through mathematics course and its materials, that they had correct knowledge about the meaning of the values of benevolence and self-control, but that they had some incorrect knowledge about the meaning of the value of respect, and that they considered the value of “love” as the most important value and that they heavily experienced such negative feelings as sadness, stress, fear, depression, uneasiness, tension, tiredness and disappointment in determining the values they wanted students to gain through materials and in the process of applying those materials. The results from this study suggest that values should be introduced into teacher training programmes and that courses and activities about how to teach the values should be included in the programmes