PRE-SERVICE PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS' OPINIONS ABOUT TEACHING MATHEMATICS

Teachers' beliefs about teaching Mathematics influence their teaching practice. The aim of the paper is to present a research on pre-service primary school teachers' opinions about teaching Mathematics. The research sample was a group of second years Primary and Preschool Pedagogy specialization students from Babes-Bolyai University. The research tool was an online questionnaire with multiple-choice and open questions. The data was quantitatively and qualitatively processed. The results show that students consider developing pupils' number sense, calculation skills, and problem solving competencies, and evolving a positive attitude towards Mathematics the main goals of teaching Mathematics in primary school. They don't consider learning mathematical notions, experimenting Geometry, and learning special word problem solving methods/algorithms important at this age. Students think that developing positive attitude towards Mathematics can be done by using games and hands-on activities; by giving tasks according each pupils' competencies, and encouraging them. They also consider teacher's positive attitude important. Only half of the students think that hand-on activities help learning Mathematics. In their opinion these activities contribute to a deeper understanding and a better illustration; but they are time consuming, they need financial effort, and in some cases pupils become addicted to them and they can't make abstraction from the concrete objects.