Preservice Teachers'Philosophical Thoughts About the Nature of Mathematics

The purpose of this study is to develop and implement a valid and reliable scale to determine the different views of preservice teachers towards the nature of mathematics. The nature of mathematics and the views of individuals towards mathematics are variables of different factors that could not be directly observed. Instead of using teachers' views, commonly accepted theoretical sources and experts' views are followed while generating premise items in the process of developing a sample of a scale. For this purpose, a draft instrument with 30 Likert-scale items was administered on a pilot group of 167 participants. According to the results of the item analysis and expert opinions, five items were taken out of the sample scale and expressions of some items were rearranged. The final scale which is called MADIFDO was applied on 520 students of a faculty of education in a medium-scaled province in the Eastern Anatolian region of Turkey, majoring in Science Education, Mathematics Education, Elementary Education, and Social Sciences Education in the academic year 2009-2010. The analysis carried out showed that the items making up the scale clustered under 4 factors, and the total rate of variance explained by these factors is 42.797 %. Besides, The Cronbach's Alpha internal consistency coefficient of the scale was found to be 0.854. MADIFDO is proved to be a valid and reliable scale that can capture the perspectives of teachers on the nature of mathematics. The results showed that half of the participants (49%) view mathematics as a semi-experimentalist human activity.