Pre-service primary teachers' attitudes towards mathematics in an Australian university

Pre-service primary teachers are important people to shape future generations, as they will be the first face of mathematics a young child meets when he/she starts school. Since numerical literacy is becoming as important as literacy itself due to ease of data collection and ease of analysis of the data, it is important to educate the future generation and their teachers to be as effective as possible in their abilities to learn/teach mathematics. The research on pre-service teachers’ mathematical anxiety and their attitudes towards mathematics show that the pre-service teacher typically has high levels of maths anxiety and that their attitude to mathematics makes a big difference to their learning during their studies at the university and then teaching mathematics to their young students. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between previous (i.e. high school) mathematics study and attitudes toward mathematics. Our study showed that a high percentage of participants who studied mathematics in their final year at high school had a somewhat positive attitude toward mathematics.