DO FUTURE TEACHERS’ DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS INFLUENCE THEIR ATTITUDES ABOUT THE NATURE, LEARNING AND ACHIEVEMENT IN MATHEMATICS?
Journal Title: Годишник на Педагогически факултет - Year 2017, Vol 14, Issue 14
Abstract
Teachers’ professional beliefs on what is mathematics, how mathematics is learned, and who is capable of learning mathematics have a significant mediating effect on teachers’ success in providing pupils with genuine opportunities to learn meaningful mathematics. An empirical study exploring the relations between a set of demographic characteristics of future primary school and pre-school teachers and their declared beliefs about the nature of mathematics, learning mathematics and mathematics achievement was conducted on a sample of university students. The sample consists of students in their final year of university studies in primary teacher education, pre-school education, and pedagogy, recruited from all four Macedonian universities offering these study programs (N=161). The basic data collecting tool was a questionnaire consisting of items taken and adjusted from the TEDS-M study. Data analysis (Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H nonparametric tests, IBM SPSS 20) suggest that gender, language of studies, parents’ education levels, as well as respondents’ secondary education may play a role in certain aspects of future teachers’ beliefs about mathematics, which they tend to profess: understanding mathematics as a process of inquiry or as a set of rules and procedures to be remembered. Results on a mathematics item designed specifically to probe whether future teachers provide responses consistent with the beliefs that they endorsed are in line with research in the field. Existing literature indicates that the interpretation of these findings requires viewing them as components of a complex system of knowledge (in particular, mathematics content knowledge) and professional beliefs. Some implications on how to plan and implement mathematics courses for primary school teachers and pre-school teachers aimed at developing the required professional beliefs to successfully support the development of mathematical thinking of young learners are discussed
Authors and Affiliations
Slagjana Jakimovik,, Zoran Mihajlovski
Keywords
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