Perception of students of pedagogical studies about their own mathematical education

Abstract

The aim of the study was to find out how students of pedagogy perceive their own learning of mathematics. The opinions of 120 students of pedagogy in the field of early school education were surveyed. The respondents’ statements on the topic “What was my mathematical education like? What do I think about it?” were divided into five categories. The first category was a short description of how the mathematical education of the respondents proceeded through the subsequent stages of learning, the next was the nature of the subject – mathematics, the third aspect was the mathematics teacher, then – the feelings of the respondents about the
subject of mathematics or mathematics lessons and the last category – the self-assessment of students about their abilities in this subject. The presented statements of the students show that all of them perceived their school mathematical education as difficult, boring. Math lessons as schematic and stressful. On the other hand, mathematics teachers as mostly incompetent pedagogues who conduct their lessons using the same methods, conducting only frontal teaching, introducing many stressful situations during the lessons and not conducive to acquiring knowledge.