Pre-service primary education teachers’ achievement goals in mathematics and their approach to learning and teaching mathematics: a person-centered analysis

In Croatia primary education teachers are trained as generalists and mathematics is only one of several different subjects that they teach. That means that when they chose their future profession, they were not necessarily drawn by their interest in becoming mathematics teacher. On the other hand, it is very important that they have good mathematics teaching skills, have positive attitudes toward mathematics and are motivated to teach it to their students. Therefore, we were interested to find out whether there is an "at-risk group" of future primary education teachers that begin their studies with low motivation for learning mathematics and whether they would have different attitudes toward learning and teaching mathematics in comparison to more motivated groups. Participants were 325 pre- service primary education students. In their first year of studies, we collected data on achievement goals in mathematics that they held in the high school, motivation for learning mathematics during their studies, mathematical epistemic beliefs, mathematics anxiety and preferences for different types of mathematical problems. We also assessed their mathematics performance. In their third year of studies, we collected data on their mathematical epistemic beliefs, mathematics anxiety and mathematics teaching efficacy beliefs. The results of the cluster analysis showed that we can group pre- service primary education teachers in three groups according to the profiles of their achievement goals in high school: (1) dominant mastery goals, (2) all goals high, (3) all goals low. We identified the third group as the "at-risk group". The results of the ANCOVA with achievement goals profile as an independent variable showed that the different groups differ in the motivation for learning mathematics during their studies, preferences for different types of mathematical problems, epistemic beliefs, mathematics anxiety and teaching efficacy beliefs, even when controlling for their mathematics performance. "At-risk group" had the least adaptive beliefs. However, the differences between groups were not large and tend to be less prominent in the third year of studies than in the first. Hence, it would be interesting to further explore the role of initial teacher education in forming adaptive beliefs on mathematics.