The evolution of preservice primary school teachers’ attitudes towards mathematics and its teaching

Abstract

The training as primary school teachers in mathematics education can be strongly influenced by emotional factors, which, in turn, are often linked to negative school experiences with mathematics. The research-action project described in this article has deepened on this phenomenon focusing on future primary school teachers in Canton Ticino, with a twofold objective: on the one hand, to design and implement effective training practices for the development of positive attitudes towards mathematics and its teaching; on the other hand, to study the evolution of such attitudes during the first two years of training. Specific didactic interventions and observation tools have been developed to detect and monitor students’ attitudes and to analyse which dimensions – emotional disposition, sense of self-efficacy, vision of the discipline (Di Martino & Zan, 2011) – have been more or less influential on the change of attitude and on which components therefore training can try to intervene more incisively and effectively.