Search results for: Dispositions

This article proposes that numeracy incorporates mathematical skills and disposition towards mathematics. A discussion of what disposition towards mathematics is and how it may be measured is provided, together with the proposition that addressing pre-service teacher disposition towards mathematics may help pre-service teachers to develop their numeracy – numeracy that reflects willingness to actually use mathematics in the real world.

This article examines the orientations of prospective teachers (PSTs) toward students’ family and their home and community experiences , as they relate to teaching mathematics. The results indicate that PSTs recognize the importance of connecting with parents, understanding home and community practices, and building on these practices to support children’s mathematical learning. Yet at the same time, they also exhibit inconsistent perspectives, at times indicating a lack of understanding as to why some families appear to be less able to support students’ academic efforts. The authors also found that some PSTs believe that at least some responsibility for success in school mathematics lies at home with the parents. The authors argue that teacher educators need to be aware of the orientations that PSTs bring with them to mathematics methods classrooms.

This study had two purposes: (1) to test the hypothesis that teacher candidates who faced challenges in student teaching had lower self-ratings on teacher dispositions than their counterparts who did not face challenges in student teaching, and (2) to develop an explanatory model to predict teacher candidates’ challenging experiences in student teaching. As the authors hypothesized, teacher candidates who successfully completed student teaching had significantly higher self-rating scores on dispositions than their counterparts who faced notable challenges. The findings from this study stand to advance our understanding of how dispositions relate to instructional practices and approaches.

The goal of this paper was to analyze the disposition domains teacher candidates draw from as they think about their early teaching experiences. The authors used the ICM framework which composed of three disposition domains—intellectual, cultural, and moral-as a heuristic for analyzing teacher candidates’ open-ended journals. The data indicate that candidates who possessed the greatest awareness of their dispositions also had the greatest capacity to unpack their assumptions.