Preparing pre-school teachers for teaching probability

Abstract

Contemporary mathematics curricula introduce probabilistic activities as early as pre-school. Through a long term pre-school teacher professional development programme we tried to investigate pre-school teachers’ beliefs about teaching probability in pre-school as well as their self-efficacy probabilistic teaching beliefs and whether these beliefs were possible to change. The programme was designed based on the assumption that teachers’ beliefs, which are formulated through knowledge and experiences, inform and formulate their classroom practice. We worked with a small group, thus our findings can only be viewed as trends rather than generalizable conclusions. Nevertheless these findings show encouraging trends towards the verification of our initial assumption.