Mathematical models in physics: A study with prospective physics teacher

The aims of this study are "to reveal prospective physics teachers' characterization of the relationship between mathematics and physics" and "to analyze their abilities to model physical phenomena". For these purposes, an achievement test consisting of two parts has been administered to 24 student teachers of physics. The first part aims to reveal their opinions about the relationship between mathematics and physics and the second part aims to determine their abilities about the construction of a model. The analysis shows that the candidate physics teachers state the role of mathematics in physics in three different ways and that although they generate their own methods for modeling physical phenomena they have serious difficulties in forming a model. As a recommendation of this study, it can be said that model and modeling process should be tackled as an object and model teaching should not content with model as a tool.