Some Conflict of Pressures Caused by the Tradition of Teaching Mathematics and the Development of the New Information Technology

Abstract

Nowadays many reasons support the view, that the development of information technology will even in the near future inevitably change both the contents of school mathematics and the pedagogy of school mathematics. For example

(1) increasingly efficient graphic and symbolic calculators are becoming cheaper and cheaper,
(2) the amount of such web-services, which can be used to enrich mathematics teaching, are increasing all the time,
(3) the networking of the schools is proceeding rapidly,
(4) teachers' and students' skills to utilise technological tools are becoming better, and so on.

However, there are also many obstacles for taking into use the new technology in schools: (1) many teachers are afraid that the increasing use of technological tools will danger the level of learning in mathematics (both the basic routines and the understanding of the concepts), (2) the traditional mathematics curriculum don't allow teachers or students to spend time in this kind of subjects, (3) teachers have often negative attitudes toward the use of new methods in teaching mathematics, (4) because the national matriculation examination don't demand skills to use technological tools those skills are not important, (5) mathematics textbooks do not take account the use of developed calculators and computers, and so on. As we want to promote the use of technological tools in mathematics teaching, at least three things will become crucial. First we have to plan and arrange such in-service and pre-service teacher education courses, where teachers and teacher students can gain their knowledge about the possibilities, which the new technology offers to mathematics education, and where they can improve their technological skills. Secondly we have to solve the problem how to motivate teachers to participate to this kind of courses. Thirdly we have to activate teachers both during the courses and after them to favour more technological learning environments in their mathematics teaching. This paper gives an overview of the results of the study by which it was tried to find out (1) how well educated Finnish mathematics teachers and teacher students experience the conflict of pressures caused by the tradition of teaching mathematics and the development of the new information technology, (2) which kind of obstacles they have met in taking into use or in planning to take in use new technology in mathematics teaching and (3) how probable they see different kind of changes in mathematics teaching methods which might or should happen in the future. All the teachers and teacher students, who answered the questionnaire of this study and/or were interviewed, had before participated in the so called MATEKNO [Technological rich learning environments in school mathematics]-project and were through that project well acquainted with the possibilities, which (1) the WWW, (2) so-called hand-held technology (graphic and symbolic calculators) and (3) the commercial and non-commercial computer programs can offer for learning and doing mathematics in a new way. The information gathered by this study will help us to design more realistic and effective in-service and pre-service teacher education in the future.