Abstracts - Earli

certain quantity of students prefer to practise such activities in an informal context. Only a smallnumber of students are not involved in any type of complementary expressive activity, external togeneral education. For the vast majority, school is an educational institution that is external tocreativity and unresponsive to the implementation of expressive activity in the school curriculum.However, not all students thought that their expressive inclinations should have a place in theclassroom as they thought it would limit their expressive freedom and it is not seen as the correctplace for such activities. Those who wish for a more systematic and incisive investment on the partof educational institutions regarding knowledge and creative activity- suggest in order ofimportance that: q normal subjects should be integrated with those linked to artistic expression; qschools should organise public performances of the results of learning in non-formal contexts; qlastly, the curriculum should become significant, active and expressive.B 328 August 2007 17:30 - 18:50Room: -1.64Paper SessionMathematics educationChair:Tommy Dreyfus, Tel Aviv University, IsraelPreservice teachers’ self-representation in mathematics in relation to their recent metacognitiveexperiences.Areti Panaoura, Frederick Institute of Technology, CyprusThe present study aims to investigate the impact of recent and intense metacognitive experienceson preservice teachers’ of pre-primary education self-representation in learning mathematics andits teaching. The first objective was to investigate whether students were aware of their cognitiveprocesses when they were solving mathematical problems and whether they were accurate in theirself-representation of strengths and weakness in mathematics in relation to their real performance.Their views of themselves are important because of their influences on the way they teachmathematics. The second objective was to investigate the influence of the recent and relativeexperiences on their self-efficacy beliefs about their ability to learn and teach mathematics. Datawere collected from 60 preservice pre-primary teachers, attending a course for the teaching ofmathematics at a Department of Pre-primary education. A questionnaire, divided into three parts,was developed measuring their self-representation in mathematics and the teaching ofmathematics. The responses at the first part constituted an image of students’ self-representation.The second part was consisted of a mathematical problem for which they had to evaluate itsdifficulty before and after solving it. At the third part they had to evaluate their ability to solvegeometrical tasks and to teach geometry at pre-primary education, before and after the solution offive geometrical tasks. Results indicated that students’ self- representation was not accurate,especially in the case of students with low mathematical performance. At the same time, intense orrepeated metacognitive experiences influence students’ self-representation and self-efficacybeliefs.– 75 –