ELEMENTARY PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ CHANGING BELIEFS:

A CONTRAST OF TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL STUDENTS

Dr. Lisa Carnell

High Point University

lcarnell@highpoint.edu

Dr. Anita Bowman

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

abowman@highpoint.edu

This study was designed to explore changes in preservice elementary teachers' beliefs about mathematical instruction and to contrast changes in beliefs between traditional students and non-traditional students within the same teacher education program. Within the mathematics methods course, the students were instructed in a constructivist approach to teaching mathematics. To assess changes in the preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics, the CGI Beliefs Scale (Peterson, Fennema, Carpenter, & Loef, 1989) was administered at the beginning, and again at the end, of the mathematics methods course.

Though the two groups started at essentially the same level, and both the traditional students and the non-traditional students increased their scores over time (p<.0001), the increase was greater for the non-traditional group. One possible explanation for the observed differences between the traditional and the non-traditional students is that the material in the methods course may have been more meaningful to the non-traditional students by virtue of their increased exposure to children and children’s thinking before the course began. For traditional students, the relatively small and undifferentiated changes across time seem to indicate a need to significantly increase traditional students’ experiences with children prior to their enrollment in a mathematics methods course.

References

Peterson, P. L., Fennema, E., Carpenter, T. P., & Loef, M. (1989). Teachers pedagogical content beliefs in mathematics. Cognition and Instruction, 6, 1-40.