Beliefs of Prospective Mathematics Teachers about their Preparedness for Teaching Mathematics

The paper is focused on beliefs about the preparedness for future mathematics teaching by prospective mathematics teachers at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Education, Palacky University in Olomouc. There are lots of various students' beliefs about mathematics - perceiving mathematics, the appropriateness of particular instructional activities or various teaching strategies used to facilitate the learning of mathematics. The paper is aimed at future teachers 'beliefs about the degree to which their lectors modelled good teaching practices. It is obvious that students graduate from the Faculty of Education with different beliefs as to their preparedness for mathematics teaching. The objective of the paper is to establish whether there is a difference in the evaluation of the degree of preparedness in two groups of students (students of Teaching at the 1st Level of Primary School and students of Teaching at the 1st Level of Primary School and Special Pedagogy) as part of the seminars Didactics of Mathematics (DIM) and Mathematics with Didactics (TMA) - the seminars are two- semester seminars, are taught by the same teacher (the author of the paper), they have the same content, but they differ in the number of lessons in each semester. The aim was to find out whether a larger number of lessons in the case of the DIM course significantly affected the evaluation of the preparedness of students. That is why a questionnaire survey was conducted in both groups in May 2016. The paper presents the results of the survey among students of didactics of mathematics which was based on the international study entitled "Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics" (TEDS- M) which examines the beliefs of future mathematics teachers about their current studies and prospective work. A total of 56 students participated in the survey and the data were processed using the relevant statistical apparatus (the chi-squared test was used to establish a statistically major difference).