Mathematics Teachers’ Following Educational Researches and Attitudes towards Educational Research: An Example from Turkey

Abstract

Raising the quality of education is one of the former aims in our country as in the whole world and with this purpose, several researches are carried out even in a single discipline. Yet, how these researches are applied by the schools is still a controversial topic. And this research was carried out to analyse the role of educational researches (e.g. theses, journal articles) in the professional development process of mathematics teachers, to determine their attitudes towards educational researches and the variables which may be effective in these attitude-construction processes. The study, which a survey used in, was carried out with 315 mathematics teachers who voluntarily participated in. Data were collected with a data collection tool called Education Researches Form from the Perspectives of Mathematics Teachers. This form, which included three parts, was designed to determine the demographic information of the participants with the first part, the sources, which the mathematics teachers used for their professional developments with the second part and the attitudes of mathematics teachers for the educational resources with the third part. During the data analysis process, the descriptive statistics, chi-squared analysis, independent-samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA were applied. In the lights of obtained results, it was concluded that only a small number of mathematics teachers had followed the educational researches and that the internet was the resource commonly used by them for their professional development. It was encountered that a significant relationship between that the teachers’ education levels as undergraduate or graduate and their following the educational researches. Furthermore, it was determined that most of the participants’ attitudes towards the educational researches were high. It was also found out that the variables of their experience and teacher-training department, where they graduated were effective on their attitudes. It was determined that the participants with high experience levels of 6–10 or 11–15 years have more positive attitudes compared with those with less experience (1–5 years) and the participants who graduated from secondary school mathematics teacher training departments have more positive attitudes than those who graduated from high school mathematics teacher training departments.