Teachers' attitudes towards realistic mathematics education approach with fractions in year 4 primary school students

Realistic mathematics education (RME) is a way of teaching, which has been developed in the Netherlands around 1960. It is based on the idea that children are solving mathematical problems, which are connected to their life experiences, with informal mathematical strategies and prior knowledge. With the help of models and illustrations they build their knowledge on their own and gradually pass from concrete stage of understanding mathematics to understanding mathematics in a symbolic way. A teacher is just a guide during the learning process and helps children to stay on the right track but he isn't a source of information. In master's thesis the RME approach is presented. We described basic characteristics of the approach and some new researches which are connected to RME approach. We also presented the model of teaching fractions with RME approach based on the book Fractions in Realistic Mathematics Education (Streefland, 1991) and our approach of teaching fractions in 4th grade based on RME approach. The empirical part of the master's thesis shows the findings of the analysis of 6 interviews with primary teachers, who teach in 4th grade. The purpose of the study was to find out how teachers teach fractions in 4th grade and to determine teacher's attitude towards our approach of teaching fractions based on RME approach. The results showed that the most common way of teaching is still transmission approach using textbooks and workbooks. In our approach based on RME, teachers saw advantages and disadvantages. Teachers believe that our approach is good because it encourages the thinking process, cooperation, vindication, children's autonomy, argumentation, logical thinking and the idea that children are active and building their own knowledge. Teachers also think that our approach is excellent for gifted students. As disadvantages they see mostly the amount of work for preparation, because you need to think a lot to design appropriate mathematical problems. They also think that our mathematical problems are difficult and not gradual enough