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Elementary teachers' attitudes and beliefs about spatial thinking and mathematics.

ABSTRACT: Considering how spatial thinking connects to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes, recent studies have evaluated how spatial interventions impact elementary students' math learning. While promising, these interventions tend to overlook other factors affecting math learning; perceptions of math abilities, beliefs about math, and math anxiety can also impact math performance. Additionally, perceptions of spatial skill and spatial anxiety impact spatial performance. This study investigated how elementary teachers' perceptions of spatial thinking connects with math perceptions. Specifically, we focused on teachers' attitudes and beliefs around three topics: teaching and learning math, spatial abilities, and spatial thinking in mathematics. We found that lower spatial anxiety related to lower anxiety about teaching math, greater alignment between math beliefs and math standards, and greater efficacy in teaching and learning math. Further, a factor analysis showed one factor that connected stereotypical math thinking with both math and spatial anxiety, and another that connected spatial competencies, teaching and learning math, and spatial thinking within math. To further evaluate spatial thinking in math, we introduced a math categorization and verified it using teachers' ratings of teaching difficulty, visualization helpfulness, and spatial-thinking involvement. Structural equation models revealed that the level of spatial-thinking categorization was the best model of all three of the teachers' ratings. Overall, results showed numerous connections between teachers' attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and spatial thinking. Future intervention studies should consider teachers who are spatial and/or math-anxious, and future research should investigate the role of stereotypical thinking in spatial and math anxiety.

SUBMITTER: Burte H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7163003 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Elementary teachers' attitudes and beliefs about spatial thinking and mathematics.

Burte Heather H Gardony Aaron L AL Hutton Allyson A Taylor Holly A HA

Cognitive research: principles and implications 20200416 1

Considering how spatial thinking connects to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes, recent studies have evaluated how spatial interventions impact elementary students' math learning. While promising, these interventions tend to overlook other factors affecting math learning; perceptions of math abilities, beliefs about math, and math anxiety can also impact math performance. Additionally, perceptions of spatial skill and spatial anxiety impact spatial performance. This ...[more]

PMID: 32300890

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Project description:Examining the nature of teachers' emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teachers' instruction. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers' lives and instruction, research on teachers' emotions has not paid much attention on teachers' emotions in the context of daily teaching. This paper explored elementary teachers' emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching mathematics, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of five cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle, pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. In order to compare teachers' emotions with instructional quality, coaching sessions were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported six categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, blended-positive, blended-negative, and mixed), described emotions often in non-typical ways (e.g., "not nervous", "anxious but in a positive way"), and experienced mixed emotions (co-occcurence of positive and negative emotions) as the most dominant emotion. Teachers also had more positive emotions anticipating teaching than actually teaching the lesson. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected the complex and context-specific nature of teaching, a phenonemenon not currently described in the teacher emotion literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers' emotions related to active instruction.

Project description:Background:This research highlights a school-university collaboration to pilot a professional development framework for integrating STEM in K-6 mathematics classrooms in a mid-Atlantic suburban school division. Because mathematics within STEM integration is often characterized as the calculations or the data representations in science classrooms, technology labs, or outside-of-school programs, developing a reasonable and realistic conceptualization of STEM integration for mathematics teachers and coaches may be especially challenging. Using design-based implementation research, university facilitators worked with eight mathematics teachers and coaches to construct an accessible vision of STEM integration built upon the design features of model-eliciting activities (MEAs). The research team strategized a flexible and fluid professional development that would (1) situate participants' breadth of experiences on a STEM curriculum integration continuum; (2) elicit a new vision of STEM integration through open-ended mathematics problems with client-driven, real-life contexts; and (3) focus on making mathematics content explicit. Results:Qualitative analysis of participant discussions and written reflections from a four-day summer institute indicates that the daily tailoring of the professional development design supported an evolving participant envisioning of STEM integration. Opportunities to engage with MEAs as learners, contrast MEAs with problem-based learning and draw from MEA design features to modify existing curricular tasks allowed participants to think more broadly about mathematics content within STEM integration. Participants communicated a readiness to use MEAs as a vehicle for K-6 STEM integration which maintains an important grounding in the teaching realities of grade-level standards and standardized test preparation. They also acknowledged the need for ongoing support as they considered the challenges of curricular pacing and administrative expectation. Conclusions:The researchers continued to support the school division during monthly academic-year professional development sessions as the teachers and coaches created and enacted prototype lessons. Their shared investment in building STEM integration capacity with a specific focus on mathematics content can offer a model for STEM integration using MEAs that challenges one-size-fits-all professional development, encourages STEM instructional leadership, and promotes mathematical readiness for STEM citizenship and careers.

Dataset Information

Elementary teachers' attitudes and beliefs about spatial thinking and mathematics.

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Elementary teachers' attitudes and beliefs about spatial thinking and mathematics.

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