Development of Prospective Elementary Teachers´ Beliefs About Mathematics During Their First Semester at University, and the Impact of Inquiry-Based Tasks

An important aim of teacher education in mathematics, especially for prospective elementary teachers, is to develop desirable beliefs about mathematics that positively affect teachers’ professional practice. Thus, we subdivide our study into two parts. First, we examine whether, and how, beliefs of prospective elementary teachers develop in their first semester. In this part, we consider beliefs as relatively stable constructs (Liljedahl et al., in Nordic Studies in Education, 17(3–4), 101-118 2012) and examine whether the first semester stimulus is strong enough to change these beliefs. Second, we examine a teaching approach based on inquiry-based tasks for first-semester prospective elementary teachers. The tasks encourage prospective elementary teachers to actively engage in mathematics by exploring basic mathematical structures, relations, and patterns. To assess the two parts, we conducted a pre-post-test study. We collected data at two universities with different teaching approaches (inquiry-based teaching approach and classic teaching approach). We administered a questionnaire both at the beginning and at the end of the semester to measure the beliefs changes of prospective elementary teachers. The study is considered a natural experiment because students were not randomly selected. Comparability for university-specific data sets was achieved through the procedure of propensity score matching. The results suggest that the first semester of prospective elementary teachers contributes to changes in their beliefs about the nature of mathematics. In addition, the data provide evidence that inquiry-based teaching approaches may contribute to the desirable development of certain beliefs of prospective elementary teachers.