Future teachers’ beliefs about teaching mathematics

Abstract

Starting in the eighties of last century, the emotional dimension in learning began to be taken under consideration. Since then, multiple studies to discover what these emotional factors were and how they influence learning were conducted, to the point of considering the emotional education as a teaching style that should convey appropriate emotional patterns. As for mathematics, often they produce rejection in some students of the degrees in education that make them feel unable to cope with mathematical tasks successfully. It’s a vicious circle: difficulties create negative emotions and attitudes towards mathematics, and these affective factors generate an unsatisfactory academic performance. However, when the teachers’ conception about maths is positive, they convey this optimism to their pupils, which improve their learning process. In this sense, we want to know future primary teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and emotions towards mathematics, in order to improve their performance in their professional practice. Specifically, we focus on the elements that students consider as determinants in the teaching task and their self-assurance to teach maths. From the results, we’d like to highlight the concern of future schoolteachers about their own possibilities to stimulate children’s interest to solve mathematical problems by developing positive attitudes, as an essential element to take into account in their profession, and that the mathematics teacher must be a good educator, well trained and equipped with knowledge, and diversity of resources and registers.