A Clustering Method for Multiple-Answer Questions on Pre-service Primary Teachers’ Views of Mathematics

Cultural values and prospective teachers’ beliefs about success in mathematics and in its teaching

“…We analysed prospective teachers' beliefs about successfully learning and teaching mathematics through cluster analysis, as already performed in our previous research (Eichler et al, 2021;Maffia et al, 2020). Thus, the prospective teachers were asked to select the three most important features for being successful in mathematics learning (question B 2) or for successfully teaching mathematics (question B4) out of 12 features (Tab.…”

“…1). Afterwards, every teacher of the sample in this research study was assigned to a cluster of beliefs using an agglomerative hierarchical algorithm; the number of clusters was chosen to minimise the absolute maximum deviation from the median of the number of participants per cluster (Maffia et al, 2020). As noted in the previous sections, beliefs about success in mathematics may differ from those about success in the teaching of the subject, so two different clustering methods were implemented for the two sets of beliefs.…”

“…We investigated the prospective teachers' beliefs about people's characteristics that are important for learning mathematics in terms of being successful in the subject and that are important for teaching mathematics in terms of being successful as a mathematics teacher. The measurement was based on multiple-answer questions taken from the study presented by Maffia et al (2020). The prospective teachers were asked to select the three most important characteristics for successfully learning mathematics, or for successfully teaching mathematics, from a list of 12 characteristics (Table 1).…”

“…1). Following our previous research (Eichler et al, 2021;Maffia et al, 2020), participants have been assigned to one out of ten clusters among those listed in Table 3.…”