A Comparative Study Between Middle School Teachers And Prospective Teachers Of The History Of Mathematics

The history of mathematics is the history of mathematics occurrence and developmentabout mathematical concept, theorem, idea and method. Learning the history of mathematicscan help students to understand the sequence of mathematical events, to have a betterunderstanding of mathematical knowledge, and to increase enthusiasm and desire to studymathematics. Mathematics educators master mathematics history knowledge well also cancontribute to grasp of mathematics teaching better. With new curriculum conducting, theeducational value of mathematics history is also taken seriously. New curriculum Requestsmore knowledge of mathematics history, which means higher requirements on teachers’knowledge of mathematics history.As prospective mathematics teachers and middle school mathematics teachers, how toevaluate the educational value of mathematics history? Which level is their history knowledgeof mathematics on? if they can satisfy the requirements of new curriculum? What is the mainsource of knowledge about history of mathematics? This paper studied these three problems,we obtained the following conclusions:(1) Middle school teachers have deeper understandingon the educational value of mathematics history than prospective teachers;(2) Prospectiveteachers and middle school teachers’ knowledge are not meet the requirements of newcurriculum standard, relatively speaking, the middle school teachers are a little better than theprospective teachers;(3) Main sources of knowledge of mathematics history are professionalcourses learning in university and extracurricular accumulation.According to above conclusions, we put forward some suggestions:(1) prospectiveteachers should improve the understanding about the educational value of the history ofmathematics;(2) prospective teachers and middle school teachers need to improve theirmathematics history knowledge;(3) normal colleges and universities need to strengthenrequirements and evaluation on mathematics history curriculum.