Relationships among Preservice Primary Mathematics Teachers’ Gender, Academic Success and Spatial Ability

The aim of this work is to investigate relationships among pre-service primary mathematics teachers’ gender, academic success and spatial ability. The study was conducted in Izmir with 193 pre-service primary mathematics teachers of Dokuz Eylül University. In the work, spatial ability test, which consists of two main subtests measuring spatial orientation and spatial visualization abilities, is used. In order to analyze the obtained data, descriptive statistics, Pearson product moment correlation coefficient and Mann-Whitney U test are used. The results indicated that pre-service primary mathematics teachers’ spatial ability level is low; there is a positive relationship between spatial ability and academic success; there is no significant difference between spatial ability and gender and the abilities of spatial orientation and spatial visualization are positively correlated. Some important research questions are also proposed.