Abstract:

The attitude of mathematics teachers towards teaching mathematics is very important and greatly affects the quality of teaching mathematics, affects the student and his attitudes towards mathematics. Students' attitude towards mathematics is in correlation with their mathematical achievement. Also different teaching methods have different impact on the learning outcomes. Teachers with a positive attitude towards teaching mathematics are more open for experimenting new methods, for adapting teaching methods to the level and learning styles of the students. Thus it is important to asses teachers' attitude towards teaching mathematics in order to find out those factors, which have to be improved. The aim of this study is to present the “Teacher`s attitudes towards teaching mathematics” scale and the results of the factor analysis made on data obtained with this scale.

A scale consisting of 31 items was developed based on the scientific literature with the aim of assessing post-primary school mathematics teachers’ attitudes towards teaching mathematics. The existing scales on attitude towards teaching mathematics are for primary school teachers, which a special case of mathematics teachers, as they teach not only mathematics, but also many other disciplines. The scale was filled out by 221 mathematics teachers from post primary schools from Israel. The data obtained was used to perform factor analysis, which created 7 categories containing 29 items out of a total of 31 items; two items were deleted because they are irrelevant and cannot belong to any category. The obtained categories are the following: Mathematics teaching anxiety, Satisfaction of teaching mathematics, Bad Feelings, Confidence in teaching mathematics, Confident in teaching mathematics, Worries in teaching mathematics, and Feeling support.

Keywords:

Attitude towards teaching mathematics, mathematics teaching, mathematics teachers.