A Survey On Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge Of Mathematics History

Along with the new curriculum reform, many aspects of mathematics textbook are altered or trimmed. Contents with humanity features in mathematics culture are brought up and mathematics history is added in the textbooks. As is known to all, we should not neglect the enlightenments and functions of the discipline humanity features (including its history) for the next generations in any disciplines. Mathematics as a logical foundation course owns no exception. Studying of mathematics history can enlighten and facilitate mathematics education in many aspects. Humanity in mathematics is a wonderful trick that nurtures students'moral emotions and arouses students'interests for mathematics. Therefore, it is reasonable and necessary to introduce"related mathematics history in classroom"in new curriculum standards.The functions of mathematic history is positive and the learning of it is indispensable, so it is natural to ask the pre-service teachers whether they have mastered enough knowledge of history of Mathematic to teach their students. The main contents of the survey are to observe problems such as the status of pre-service teachers'understanding of mathematics history and their source of obtaining the knowledge. Based on the curriculum standards and mathematics history involved in senior high school mathematics textbooks, questionnaire and the following up interview outline are designed. As for data processing, SPSS software is used for basic statistics analysis and variance analysis. Finally, the following conclusions are reached: pre-service teachers'knowledge of mathematics history are far from satisfactory and the teaching effect of mathematics history is undesirable. So it is necessary to strengthen the understanding of mathematics history and reinforce the teaching of mathematics culture, more importantly, pre-service teachers should be aware of the fact that culture literacy is indispensible for their teaching.Based on the conclusions, corresponding suggestions are then given: try to enhance the importance pre-service teachers attached to history of Mathematics; the school should intensify the course opening and checking of Mathematics history and conduct appropriate training and so on.