Abstract:

Mathematics education researchers are growing interest on the role of values in mathematics teaching and learning. Inspired by Alan Bishop’ seminal contribution, the Third Wave Project supports large scale studies worldwide, aiming to document and further understand the role of values and valuing in mathematics teaching and learning. Research has shown that the values promoted by mathematics teachers in their classrooms may hinder or facilitate students’ learning, which points towards the need to identify and understand the values that teachers inculcate in their classes.

A large scale study has been implemented in Portugal to characterize the values of mathematics teachers and of their 7th and 10th grade students. Following a mixed methods approach, the study comprises an online survey with closed and open-ended questions. Among other topics, it addresses the teachers’ views regarding mathematics and its learning and teaching, as well as their perspectives on classroom use of hands-on and digital resources. Data was collected in 2019, before the pandemic events. A total of 113 mathematics teachers and 3396 students answered the survey.

As several research results suggest, and national curricular guidelines acknowledge, technology plays and undisputable role in supporting and enhancing mathematics learning. By focusing on data from the teachers survey, we aim i) to assess the level of technology integration in Portuguese mathematics classrooms, and ii) to understand the role of teachers’ views about mathematics teaching and learning in such integration.

The majority of the teachers claim to use a variety of technological tools in their maths lessons (e.g., interactive board, videoprojector, computer, calculators). However, their students do not. Only 45,1% of the teachers promote the use of the scientific calculator and 32,7% use the graphing calculator. The use of other technological tools by students in their maths classes is scarce: social networks are the least used resource, with 97,3% of the teachers claiming they rarely or never use them. A similar case is the use of mobile phones for conducting online search or resorting to mathematical apps (e.g. Photomath, GeoGebra) or other apps (e.g., Plickers, Socrative, Milage). Only 17% of teachers claimed to promote the use of specific computational software (e.g. GeoGebra or a spreadsheet) and nearly 20% use learning platforms (e.g., Moodle, Google Classroom, ClassDojo, Escola Virtual).

About 75% of the teachers agree in that teaching mathematics entails explaining the theory followed by students’ drill and practice, as well as teaching to use the right formula at the right time. This suggests that, overall, they value an approach to the teaching of mathematics comprising direct instruction and application tasks, which is consistent with their preference for the use of the calculator. Although teachers seem divided regarding the profuse proposal of drill and practice tasks, the majority thinks that teaching maths is also about showing how it can be used in everyday contexts, checking whether students mobilize knowledge in new situations, or engaging them in more complex tasks. Even though this perspective may be regarded as favouring challenging tasks where students can benefit from the affordances of techno-mathematical tools, the fact that teachers occasionally used them in the classroom points, again, to a more traditional view of mathematics teaching and learning.

Keywords:

Mathematics teachers' values; Values and valuing; Values about technology use; Technologies for mathematical learning; Large scale study.