PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Exploring Pre-service Elementary Teachers’ Relationships with Mathematics via Creative Writing and Survey
Page: 129
Thirty-two pre-service elementary teachers completed a survey regarding their beliefs and attitudes towards learning and teaching mathematics and two creative writing tasks. In the first writing task participants described their personal relationship with personified mathematics and in the second, they introduced personified mathematics to their future students. By interpreting the survey and writings, different aspect of attitudes towards mathematics were discovered. A main finding was that the two writing tasks were able to provide a more nuanced view of how pre-service teachers’ beliefs about mathematics changed over time. We found that their past experiences with mathematics often affected the way that they talked about mathematics to their students, though they did attempt to suppress their negative experiences when introducing mathematics to their students.