Attitudes towards mathematics in pre-service teachers: a comparative study between Spain and Portugal focusing on anxiety

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Margarida
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Fernández Cézar, Raquel, Rosa, João
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/8169
• topic: Attitudes; Anxiety; Mathematics; Pre-service teacher training; Comparative study; Atitudes; Ansiedade; Matemática; Formação inicial de professores; Estudo comparativo

This article is part of a larger project - Attitudes towards Sciences and Mathematics - involving several Ibero-American countries. In this paper, we analyze attitudes related to anxiety towards mathematics in two studies with Spanish and Portuguese pre-service teachers. The participants of the first study (N = 186) are Spanish pre-service teachers at the beginning of the mathematics curricular units of their courses, and Portuguese pre-service teachers at the beginning of professional master's degree courses; the participants of the second study (N = 229) are the same Spanish pre-service teachers and Portuguese pre-service teachers at entry into higher education. The Modified Auzmendi Questionnaire was used to research the association between anxiety and gender, stage of education and country. An association between anxiety and country was found in the first study, Spanish pre-service teachers showing greater anxiety. At entry into higher education (second study), no significant difference in level of anxiety was found across the two countries. We concluded that further cross-country comparative research is needed to examine the stability of those findings, and whether the pedagogies used throughout teacher training contribute to the increase or decrease of anxiety towards mathematics.