Introduction: Using concrete materials makes students active, provides richer learning environments, makes mathematics teaching enjoyable, and increases student’s motivation. For this reason, for better understanding of mathematical concepts in mathematics education by the students it is essential to benefit from concrete materials. In this respect, it is important to examine prospective middle school mathematics teachers’, who have important roles during mathematics teaching process, skills about using concrete materials involved in the middle school mathematics curriculum. In this context, in this study it is aimed to investigate prospective middle school mathematics teachers’ skills about using concrete materials in mathematics teaching.

Method: In this study qualitative research approach was adapted and case study method was used. The participants of the study were determined by purposeful sampling method. Accordingly, a total of 45 second grade prospective teachers enrolled in Education Faculty of a public university and had taken the Instructional Technologies and Material Design course before were included in the study. During data collection procedure unstructured observation technique was benefited. In order to examine prospective teachers’ skills about using concrete materials in a natural environment this technique was preferred. In this respect, in the first stage theoretic lessons were taught for five weeks within the scope of Instructional Technologies and Material Design course which was conducted by one of the researchers and concrete materials used in mathematics lessons were introduced. In the second stage the subjects where concrete materials have been frequently used and the learning objectives related to those subjects were determined. In the next step the class was divided into 7 groups and these subjects were distributed to those groups. It was required from the prospective teachers to share the learning objectives already given to their groups and expected to use concrete materials related to the objectives taught. Prospective teachers’ skills about using concrete materials were examined through observing their lessons by two researchers. Two researchers had role as being participant observer in order to determine how and at which level prospective teachers were using concrete materials in classroom environment. In this study to determine for which purpose prospective teachers were using concrete materials and whether they were using concrete materials effectively or not the researchers had become a part of the natural environment. Together with the other researcher who was also conducting prospective teachers’ another courses and the researcher conducting the existing course made prospective teachers comfortable while teaching. While researchers taking notes during observation they might affect prospective teachers or they might miss their behaviors. For this reason, during observation video records were taken. Before taking video records voluntariness of prospective teachers was required. The video records of prospective teachers’ lecturing collected by means of observation were transcribed. The documents made were analyzed using descriptive and content analysis techniques. In the content analysis made for analyzing the lessons, three themes were used. By comparing students’ lesson plans and lecturing, the codes of the purpose of the lesson and the way of using were used. For this reason, related to their using the codes of “lecturing, practicing and representation” and with the way of using the codes of “group work, individual work and only representation” were used. While performing these codes the codes made in the study of Tuncay-Yıldız (2012) were inspired.

Results: While prospective teachers were designing their lessons, they were concentrated on the grade level (5, 6, 7 and 8th grade) of the subjects distributed. Moreover, while prospective teachers were using concrete materials they were prepared the classroom activities through group work, individual work and representation based on the usability of the material. Among those ways they were preferred mostly the way of group work. Although most of the prospective teachers prepared their lessons for teaching a new concept that is, for the purpose of lecturing, it was observed that some of them could not accomplish this purpose. Although 25 prospective teachers had designed their lessons planning to lecture by using concrete materials, it was observed that only 15 of those accomplished their purpose while conducting their lessons.

Discussion: In light of the results of the study, it was observed that most of the prospective teachers could not use concrete materials effectively and appropriately for their purposes. Although many of prospective teachers had wanted to use the concrete materials for the purpose of teaching of the subject, they could not go beyond using for the purpose of practicing. Within the prospective teachers who used concrete materials effectively it was observed that they used a limited amount of materials. When the studies in literature were investigated related to this, the reason of why prospective teachers could not think a different material can be their lack of experience about the material. Moreover, it was observed that the reason of why prospective teachers could not use concrete materials effectively is their lack of familiarity with these materials and knowledge about their properties.