Measuring preservice teacher beliefs about mathematics and mathematics teaching: an evaluation of the TEDS-M beliefs scale

Abstract Debates about effective teaching practices, whether explicit instruction or inquiry-based, have resurfaced. A recent national report on teacher education in Australia has strongly advocated for explicit modelling as one of the effective pedagogical practices. There is a need for a valid instrument to examine preservice teachers’ beliefs and whether they are changing. Different approaches have been utilised to conceptualise and measure beliefs, including survey tools for large-scale studies. One of the influential beliefs surveys was developed in the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) international study to measure preservice teachers’ beliefs across 17 countries. The purpose of the current study is to validate the instrument in a sample of 760 preservice teachers from two universities in a metropolitan area in Australia. The results show that the preservice teachers in Australia tend to endorse the beliefs of mathematics as a process of inquiry more than mathematics as a collection of facts and rules. In addition, the preservice teachers tended to support the active role of students in learning mathematics but only 12.33% endorsed learning mathematics through teacher direction. The confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modelling showed that a four-subscale structure with the deletion of one item in the achievement subscale provides a reliable model. In addition, the results suggest that the use of an average of responses across items in each of the subscales is appropriate in reporting the data. The survey may provide a useful tool to examine changes in beliefs about teaching pedagogy and practice as policy recommendations regarding high-impact teaching practices become more deeply embedded in initial teacher education programs.