Difficulties in basic mathematical concepts in teachers to be

Abstract

Mathematics is important for the formation of a citizen because it constitutes a powerful instrument of analysis of the reality, of understanding of the world and of development of the critical capacity to intervene.
We believe that this is the most important purpose of people’s mathematical activity, but to reach it, future teachers must have confidence in the basic mathematical knowledge on which to build further knowledge. However, in the field of mathematics education, errors constantly appear in student productions.
This article discusses the errors committed by students because they provide rich and interesting information about how the mathematical knowledge is constructed. This analysis will allow us to find the common patterns that errors follow, and thus we’ll be able to make inferences about the mental processes and the structures that help to organize knowledge.
It is precisely the regularity in which certain errors appear that allows us to develop classifications of these errors. Also, we must take into consideration that the categories are not hermetic compartments and often overlap with each other, as errors rarely occur due to a single cause. For this reason, to try to better understand the causes, errors are categorized according to different criteria.