Preservice Primary School Teachers’ Elementary Geometry Knowledge

Geometrical notions and properties occur in real-world problems, thus Geometry has an important place in school Mathematics curricula. Primary school curricula lays the foundation of Geometry knowledge, pupils learn Geometry notions and properties by exploring their environment. Thus it is very important that primary school teachers have a good base in elementary Geometry. The aim of this paper is to present a research on how pre-service primary school teachers master elementary Geometry notions and properties related with some basic shapes and solids. The research shows that there are students, who can’t recognize basic geometrical shapes or solids. Two third of the students can’t define correctly basic geometrical shapes: they don’t know the correct properties of the shapes; they know the properties of the shapes, but they repeat some properties in the definition or they miss some properties from the definition. As regarding geometrical solids, more than one third of the students couldn’t draw the correct two-dimensional representation and one third didn’t know how to draw the net of them.