Investigation of Teacher Candidates' Teaching Maths Anxiety and Teaching Maths Competencies

Abstract

Considering the fact that teacher candidates' maths teaching anxiety levels and maths teaching competency levels will affect their maths teaching in future, the desired beliefs should be tried to gain teacher candidates. Therefore, a positive contribution will be made to achieve the desired gains in maths education. In the study, it is aimed to examine the competency levels of pre-school teacher candidates in maths teaching and their maths teaching anxiety levels in terms of various variables and to determine whether there is a relationship between the maths teaching anxiety of the candidates and their level of competency for teaching maths. The research is in relational scanning model. The "Maths Teaching Anxiety Scale" and "Maths Teaching Competencies Scale" were implemented to 104 pre-school pre-service teacher candidates studying in 2019-2020 academic year, which constitutes the sample of the study. As a result of the analysis, it has been found that while teacher candidates' maths teaching anxiety levels do not change by gender, female teacher candidates consider themselves more competent than male teacher candidates in maths teaching and 4th-grade teacher candidates have significantly less anxiety of maths teaching compared to 3rd grades. Besides, it has been determined that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between the maths teaching anxiety scores of the candidates and the average of the maths teaching efficacy scores.