Development of a Scale to Measure Teachers' Beliefs Toward Struggles in Mathematics
Date
2022-04
Authors
Kirmizi, Mehmet
Tarim, Kamuran
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Abstract
In this study we are developing a valid and reliable scale to measure teachers’ belief of efficacy of productive struggle. Traditionally, struggles in mathematics is considered something undesirable. However, the recent understanding frames struggles something necessary for gaining deep understanding. The idea that mistakes and errors are necessary for the growth of the brain is well supported by the evidence from different fields. Empirical evidence suggests the idea of that students can transform their unproductive struggles to productive ones. If teachers do not want to support their students struggle; students cannot take full advantage of productive struggles in mathematics. Teachers’ positive beliefs and attitudes toward struggles in mathematics is essential to harness the power of struggles. For this poster, we plan to share our work developing a scale to measure teachers’ beliefs towards struggle. We identified that productive struggle is usually tied with the four components: conceptual understanding, persistence, tasks and times, and joy of teaching. After identifying these four components we exchanged several emails with a leading scholar in the field to make align our understanding with her vision. After that we developed initial pool of items based on theoretical components that is mentioned above. The initial pool contains 52 items, we evaluate each item based on several criteria and then finally the number of items is reduced in 21. We sent initial scale to number of graduate students and pre-service mathematics and elementary school teachers. To this date we are still collecting data to asses the internal reliability of our scale.
Description
Keywords
teaching, education, mathematics, productive struggle
Citation
Kirmizi, M., & Tarim, K. (2022). Development of a scale to measure teachers' beliefs toward struggles in mathematics. Poster presented at the International Research Conference for Graduate Students, San Marcos, Texas.