Abstract
This chapter describes a study whose aim is to highlight the cultural notion of beliefs related to mathematics teaching with respect to future mathematics teachers and teacher educators at the lower-secondary level. Through conducting multi-sample latent profile analysis, this study identified the belief profiles for the teachers and the educators. By associating the profiles with countries and employing hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), cultural features influencing beliefs were revealed.
Our results show that the beliefs of future teachers and teacher educators in the same country are homogeneous. This suggests that the country is an important factor for shaping beliefs. We also discovered that the beliefs are homogenous in countries that share the same cultural features: geographical regions, historical traditions, levels of human development, or knowledge achievement. HCA grouped all Western countries with a Greek/Latin/Christian tradition together, and divided the East Asian countries into two clusters—whether or not having Confucian heritage. All countries with very high human development indices (HDI) were grouped in one cluster. The countries in the other cluster had a lower HDI. All higher-achieving countries were in the same cluster as well. Our results also indicate that the process-of-inquiry view on the nature of mathematics and the active-learning view on teaching and learning mathematics dominated in all countries with respect to future teachers as well as to teacher educators.
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Notes
- 1.
For more information on the samples, see the TEDS-M international report (Tatto et al. 2012).
- 2.
An educator was counted in each level if he or she served at both primary and secondary levels. German data sets did not provide enough information to categorize its educators by teacher preparation units. Following the German national representative coordinator’s suggestion, its educators were distinguished into two levels through one question in the Teacher Educator Questionnaire. The question asked educators for how many years they have prepared each of future primary and secondary teachers. If an educator teaches future secondary teachers for more than zero years, he or she would be categorized into the data set of secondary level educators. We did not apply this method to all countries because substantial proportions of missing values were found or the question was not administered in some countries.
- 3.
Similar to these four Western countries in Europe, Norwegian future teachers also belonged to the inquiry-preferred belief profile.
- 4.
Future teachers in Norway and the United States, as in these five Western countries, were also of the active-learning-preferred belief profile.
- 5.
Future teachers in Norway and the United States were also of the incremental-view-endorsed belief profile.
- 6.
The number of secondary level educators from Botswana in the study is 18.
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Wang, TY., Hsieh, FJ. (2014). The Cultural Notion of Teacher Education: Comparison of Lower-Secondary Future Teachers’ and Teacher Educators’ Beliefs. In: Blömeke, S., Hsieh, FJ., Kaiser, G., Schmidt, W. (eds) International Perspectives on Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs and Opportunities to Learn. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6437-8_12
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