| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 科學教育研究所 === 99 === In this study, researcher-developed questionnaires were used to study the professional development needs of in-service elementary mathematics teachers. Teachers’ views of professional standards for mathematics teachers and their own assessment of what kind of professional competences were needed in order to improve their teaching were investigated.
The subjects of this study included elementary school mathematics teachers in Taichung County, Changhua County, Nantou County and Taichung City. Using stratified sampling, this study involved a total of 1,087 effective samples. In order to complete this study, 11 mathematics teachers who has written pre-test questionnaire be invited to be semi-structured interview, besides using the five dimensions (mathematics content and curriculum knowledge, student learning, teaching, assessment, professional accountability and development) of professional standards for mathematics teachers to questionnaire survey.Various methods were used to analyze the collected data, including mean, standard deviation, frequency statistics, percentage, t test, one way ANOVA, and chi-square test.
The conclusions of this research are as follows:
First, in the elementary schools from the four areas of central Taiwan, generally speaking, the mathematics teachers have positive views of their professional standards.
Second, there are some variations regarding to teachers views about the extent to which they agree or disagree with the listed professional standards, with respect to teachers of different background variables participated in this study, including gender, age, school area, and the years of service. Although there are some variations across teacher’s opinions pertaining to different variables that may reach statistical significance level at .05, the differences in the means appeared relatively small in view of their practical significance.
Third, in terms of teachers needs for professional development, math teachers with different gender, age, school area, educational background, the highest fields of expertise, years of service in the four areas, indicated roughly the same needs in all dimensions for their professional development.
Fourth, in most cases, teachers’ perceptions of the importance of the professional standards are in line with their own assessments of their professional development needs. There are however some exceptional cases.
Fifth, the elementary mathematics teachers tend to agree with the importance of learner-centered approach, but our results indicated that they pay less attention to the importance of innovation, cooperation within a community, and international perspective or global awareness. In addition, it appears that teachers have widely different opinions regarding to the importance of the application of technology.
Based on the results obtained in this study, some recommendations were offered for the teacher training institutions, research teams that provide teacher professional development, relevant government units, and people who want to do similar research.
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