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Abstract
This paper examines the views of pre-service and in-service teachers with regard to the sources of students‟ mathematical difficulties. A group of 40 pre-service mathematics, 15 in-service mathematics and 15 in-service elementary teachers participated in this study. Questionnaires are used as data collection tools to see what the participants think about the sources of student difficulties. The notion of “obstacles to learning” is used as a framework to analyze the collected data. The analysis is carried out on the basis of three main categories to which participant teachers attribute students‟ difficulties: epistemological causes, psychological causes and pedagogical causes. The data analysis reveals that both pre-service and in-service teachers tend to attribute students‟ difficulties to student-related factors, namely psychological causes. We discuss the findings in terms of these three sources of learning difficulties, educational implications and note the usefulness of the employing the “obstacles to learning framework” in examining not only students‟ learning difficulties but also teachers‟ views of the sources for student difficulties.
Highlights
This paper examines the views of pre-service and in-service teachers with regard to the sources of students‟ mathematical difficulties
For the purpose of this paper, we focus our attention only on pre-service teachers‟ responses to the question, what can be the causes of the students‟ difficulties in learning a mathematical concept?3 The second project, on the other hand, is concerned with the professional development of in-service elementary teachers, elementary mathematics teachers and elementary science and
The data presented so far show that both pre-service and in-service teachers attribute students‟ difficulties in mathematics mainly to the psychological causes
Summary
This paper examines the views of pre-service and in-service teachers with regard to the sources of students‟ mathematical difficulties. A close inspection of subject–specific studies conducted within the last four decades in mathematics education literature vindicates this proposition Common to all these studies (Hart et al, 1980; Tall, 1991) are the findings showing lack of students‟ understanding of and difficulties with mathematical concepts. In other words, these studies collectively show that students have difficulties with many mathematical concepts taught in different level of their schooling. Important is what teachers think about sources of students‟ mathematical difficulties. The latter question is the primary focus of this paper and we aim to investigate how teachers view sources of students‟ mathematical difficulties and provide insights into sources of these difficulties
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