READINESS OF FUTURE PRIMARY-SCHOOL TEACHERS TO SOLVE NON-STANDARD MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS

Abstract

"The paper will present partial results of a pilot research entitled “Readiness of future primary-school teachers to solve non-standard mathematical problems”. For the purposes of the research, a didactic test was designed – a set of 10 non-standard mathematical problems. The problems were chosen in difficulty corresponding to the curriculum of the 5th grade of primary school. The difficulty of the individual problems was statistically verified. A questionnaire survey method was chosen for the research. 74 students of the field of Teaching at the 1st Level of Primary School from the Faculty of Education of Palacký University in Olomouc participated in the pilot research. The researchers plan to carry out the research in a national and wider international context. In the pilot research, we were particularly interested in the success of the respondents in solving individual problems and the test as a whole, and the subjectively perceived difficulty of the individual problems in the context of the achieved success rate. It can be concluded that not all the prospective teachers were able to solve all the assigned problems. Some mistakes were caused by inattention, others by the stress factor of the time limit. The analysis of the subjectively perceived difficulty of the problem in relation to the success rate was interesting. We believe that the results of the research should be reflected in the concept of undergraduate teacher training."