The relationship between student teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics and their attitudes toward mathematics and teaching mathematic

This study investigates the relationship between student teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics and their attitudes toward mathematics and teaching mathematics. The primary focus of this study is beliefs held about the nature of mathematics by primary mathematics student teachers in the State of Kuwait. Another purpose of this study is to explore the relationships among beliefs about the nature of mathematics held by these student teachers and their attitudes toward mathematics and teaching mathematics. The design of the study is both descriptive and correlational. The subjects were 418 mathematics student teachers enrolled in the College of Education at Kuwait University and the College of Basic Education at the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), also in Kuwait. The beliefs about the nature of mathematics scale (BNMS) was developed by the researcher to measure the student teachers' beliefs about three views, namely the Platonist view, the instrumentalist view, and the problem-solving view. In addition, two existing scales were used: Mathematics Attitude Scales (MAS) and Teaching Mathematics Attitude Scales (TMAS). The interviews with 16 Kuwaiti mathematics student teachers and 4 instructors who teach in one or the other college provided explanatory data. The findings of the research were that the Arabic translation of the American mathematics attitudes scale (MAS) and the Australian teaching mathematics attitudes scale (TMAS) were valid for the Arab sample. The reliability and validity of the MAS and TMAS were established using interpretation of Arab experts' opinions, factor analysis testing, and Cronbach (alpha) reliability coefficients. A significant finding was that there is a relationship between the student teachers' attitudes toward mathematics and their attitudes toward mathematics teaching. On the other hand, no correlation was found between the MAS and the TMAS in the one part and the BNMS for the other part, that is, there seemed be no relationship between their beliefs about the nature of mathematics and their attitudes toward mathematics and teaching mathematics. The MAS and the TMAS scales have correlations with the background variables. The gender variable, measured against the findings relating to Kuwaiti student teachers' attitudes toward mathematics, indicated that males were more confident and less anxious in learning and teaching mathematics and mathematics than were females. As for the findings on the BNMS, when related to the gender variable, we found that for the females the highest scores were for the instrumentalist view, while for the males the highest scores were for the problem-solving view.