Teacher education programmes offer pre-service teachers limited opportunities to realistically practise and develop skills and strategies for teaching pupils, without the risk of adversely affecting pupils' learning. The purpose of this study was set to contribute with knowledge concerning how pre-service teachers develop self-efficacy beliefs…

International comparisons of student achievement in mathematics and their attitudes towards, confidence with and anxiety to mathematics have a long history. Likewise, detailed international comparisons of teacher education programs have also been conducted. However, the relationship between the teacher education programs and teacher anxiety for…

The lecture format, while being the subject of much criticism, is still one of the most common formats of university mathematics teaching. This paper investigates lecturing as a means of modelling mathematical discourse, sometimes highlighted in the literature as one of its most important functions. The data analysed in the paper are taken from…

Play-based preschool pedagogy usually relies on informal teaching while policy trends and some research call for increased formalisation of the pedagogy. Using Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing, this article characterises mechanisms that link evaluation of preschool to the push towards the formalisation of teaching in preschool.…

This article explores collective and individual perspectives on preschool mathematics within a professional development programme. All seven teachers at one Swedish preschool participated in a one-year research-based professional development programme. At the beginning and then again at the end of the programme, the teachers collectively wrote…

The use of digital textbooks in mathematics is increasing. However, the implementation of digital textbooks in schools is complicated. The objective of this paper is to understand how the introduction of a digital textbook affects the activity of teaching mathematics. An intervention was conducted where six mathematics teachers, with students in…

Planning is an essential part of teachers' work that has consequences for students' learning. However, previous research shows that what it means to plan vary. To explore the meaning of planning from teachers' point of view, and to open up for planning as a situated and emotional process, an interview study with Swedish mathematics teachers was…

Digital media offer new opportunities to visualise mathematics and to engage students in interactive activities. The launching of digital teaching platforms in mathematics has, however, been met with some hesitation, and printed textbooks still play a substantial role in classrooms. This study addresses questions about how affordances of the…

This article presents a teaching intervention where programming was used to facilitate preschoolers' learning of mathematics, especially in their development of spatial thinking. In the intervention, the programming was made with a small programmable robot especially designed for young students. The results indicate that the children developed…

Thematic work that integrates different knowledge areas is considered suitable for developing young children's knowledge and skills in early childhood education. This paper reports evidence from a survey of early childhood teachers' work with mathematics and art integrated in thematic work. In this study, we aim to explore how teachers perceive…

A research-based teacher education rests on research on the practices of teacher education. We undertook a survey of the opportunities to learn mathematics pedagogy and to teach mathematics perceived by students in their last year of teacher education. Questionnaires were distributed to 753 students graduating in June 2020 from 13 Swedish…

Teachers are responsible for teaching, and when they plan, they are part of a complex non-linear social practice of curriculum making. When planning, teachers draw on curriculum materials, which are often designed to promote reform; however, previous studies show that this is not always the case. A study on planning for mathematics teaching in…

This paper reports on a case study of a student's rationales for learning mathematics. We operationalize Stieg Mellin-Olsen's educational concept of rationales for learning and apply the concept on data consisting of three semi-structured interviews with a student in the Swedish prison education program. Our analysis shows that the student's…

This paper reports on a combined research-development project conducted in collaboration between researchers and preschool teachers in three Swedish preschools. The aim is to investigate how ongoing preschool activities may become the starting point for mathematics teaching in which toddlers are given the opportunity to distinguish necessary…

Early childhood educators' math anxiety and its relation to their frequency of pedagogic actions was examined through a questionnaire completed by 352 participants (aged 21-65) representative of the Swedish municipality where the study was conducted. Our sample contained 189 certified preschool teachers and 163 preschool caregivers who…