Abstract
Our research includes undergraduate students who major in primary school education. Their academic background is prevailingly in the humanities. This poses specific demands on their mathematics instruction at university. To attract them to their mathematics course and raise its effectiveness, we use a series of activities. Writing assignments intrigue the students, shape their personal mathematical experience, and connect literature with mathematics. Special attention is paid to problem solving in which the mathematical concepts studied are applied. The plots and characters from popular children stories, novels, or movies diversify mathematical problems and make them more likable to the students. This results in significant reduction of mathematics anxiety in the classroom and the students advance uninhibited and motivated. Thus using humanities-oriented accents in representing mathematical ideas successfully complements the teaching of mathematics to prospective primary school teachers. It is also a model to be followed in further teaching practices.
Highlights
Our teaching practice shows that the majority of undergraduate students in primary school education are keen on the humanities
The word problems we offered to the prospective primary school teachers did not require tedious calculations, but a simple idea to be applied
To improve the undergraduate students’ problem solving skills, we offered them such long word problems requiring a lot of time to be read and shorter problems with funny plots and characters
Summary
Our teaching practice shows that the majority of undergraduate students in primary school education are keen on the humanities Their inclination in literature, history, or culture is a downside neither for their math education at the university nor for their future teaching career. For these students, the precise formulation of mathematical ideas can be confusing and in some cases leads to mathematics anxiety. Even small gaps in curricular mathematics knowledge of prospective primary school teachers may make them insecure and interfere with their teaching practices For this reason Rayner, Pitsolantis, and Osana [7] examine the relationship between pre-service teachers’ mathematics anxiety and their conceptual and procedural knowledge of mathematics. Similar concerns drive Haciomeroglu [8] to search to what extent mathematics anxiety can generate mathematics teaching anxiety
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