Exploring main obstacles of inflexibility in mathematics teachers’ behaviour in accepting new ideas: the case of equivalence between infinite sets

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explore the most important obstacles of inflexibility in mathematics teachers’ behaviour in accepting new ideas, especially, while encountering a new situation. In so doing, the concept of equivalence between infinite sets, which is one of the challenging issues in mathematics teaching and learning, was selected as the subject matter of the study. The participants of the study were 64 high-school mathematics teachers. To collect the data, they were exposed to a challenging new situation involving equivalence between infinite sets. Then they were interviewed regarding the decisions they had made. The analysis of the data revealed that the main obstacles to accepting new ideas by mathematics teachers were preference to well-known procedures and tendency to work with methods with a more general extensive domain of the function. In addition, while the spirit of the article seems to imply that teachers are not flexible, in terms of accepting a new method, the data on teacher choices highlighted the positive results of teacher flexibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Equivalence between infinite sets
• flexibility
• reluctance to use new methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this study, the participants are introduced in abbreviated names due to the unwillingness of some.