A preliminary analysis on what Malaysian secondary school teachers valued in mathematics learning?

Teacher values played a crucial role in shaping the mathematics classroom practices. Values in the mathematics classroom are categorised into mathematical (the mathematics discipline), mathematics educational (the mathematics pedagogy practices), and general educational values (the moral principles). By using convenience sampling, we explored Malaysian secondary school mathematics teachers’ values in mathematics learning through an online survey. 41 secondary school mathematics teachers had participated in this study. Analysis from 10 items with continuous dimensions was presented. Data were analysed using One-way ANOVA and the independent t-test. The preliminary analysis showed that Malaysian secondary mathematics teachers valued the attributes of mathematical values such as “objectism”, “openness”, and “progress” over the respective opposing dimensions “rationalism”, “mystery”, and “control”, respectively. In terms of mathematics educational values, Malaysian secondary mathematics teachers tended to value “process”, “hard work”, “effort”, “application”, “ideas and practice”, “exploration”, and “creating” in mathematics learning. There were no significant differences in terms of teachers’ gender and ethnicity. The significant difference was found in terms of different years of teaching experience. Experienced teachers tended to value “hard work”, “mystery”, and “progress” compared to teachers with lesser years of teaching experience. The results will contribute to the understanding of Malaysian teachers’ teaching behaviour in the mathematics classroom and provide insights on values research in the Asian context. Copyright © 2021 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.