Primary teachers’ beliefs and emotional disposition towards mathematics and its teaching

As researches in mathematics education and as teacher educators we are strongly interested in facing the question “what is necessary for teaching mathematics effectively”. The main directions of research emphasize the cognitive side of the answer to this question. In our view, attention from a purely cognitive dimension has to shift to a wider view encompassing also an affective plane, focusing on teachers’ beliefs, emotions and attitudes. We conducted a study to investigate the attitude towards mathematics and its teaching of 189 primary school pre-service teachers. We used as tool a questionnaire composed by questions focused on the three components of attitude (emotional disposition, view, perceived competence), declined along the two dimensions of mathematics and its teaching, according to the TAMT-model. In this paper we discuss some of the results regarding the relationships among the different components of the model with a particular attention to the links among past experiences as students, present, and future perspectives as future teachers.