An investigation of the mathematics educational values from the perspectives of teachers, students and curriculum

The purpose of this study is to investigate mathematics educational values of 8th grade middle school students, mathematics teachers and middle school mathematics curriculum. Employing partially mixed concurrent equal status design, the study conducted with totally 970 eight grade middle school students attending public middle schools located eight central districts of Ankara and 25 mathematics teachers working at the same schools. The written data source of the study was the 2013 Turkish middle school (5th-8th grade) mathematics curriculum. The interview schedule for mathematics teachers, the students' mathematics educational value scale, and the curriculum analysis form were developed by the researchers and used as the main data collection instruments of the study. The findings indicated that students' mathematics educational value profile composed of the following values as "real life and experience", "mathematical competence", "procedural competence", "elite" and "effort and accessibility". Regarding the mathematics teachers' value profiles, the results indicated that "real life and experience", "mathematical competence", "elite", "effort and accessibility", "affective dimension", "focusing", "fun" and "procedural competence" were the value dimensions of the mathematics teachers. Furthermore, the results showed that the mathematics educational values embedded in the mathematics curriculum were "mathematical competence", "real life and experience", "effort and accessibility", "procedural competence", "affective dimensions", "focusing" and "elite". As a result, it is expected that the comprehensive findings of this study may contribute to revealing the vital importance of the values in mathematics education as well as raising the awareness of the stakeholders. Keywords: mathematics educational values, middle school students, mathematics teachers, matematics curriculum.