Study on the Cognition of Pre-service Mathematics Teachers’ Understanding of Improving Middle School Students’ Mathematics Achievement

How to effectively improve middle-school students' mathematics performance has become a hot-button issue among educators and researchers. Although many scholars have conducted research in this area, there is still a lack of studies on pre-service mathematics teachers' understanding of this problem. In this study, we took 57 educational master's degree students from Shandong Normal University as the research objects. A questionnaire survey was used to investigate pre-service mathematics teachers' understanding this issue. A questionnaire that included two open-ended questions was used as the survey instrument. The data collected was coded and after analyzing we draw the conclusion: pre-service mathematics teachers' understanding of how to improve middle-school students' mathematics scores is relatively limited and there are cognitive deviations. These limitations and deviations are mainly reflected in the following aspects: 1. They fail to realize that classroom interaction should be conducted with an appropriate degree; 2. They overlook the fact that stratified teaching may lead to students developing feelings of inferiority or complacency; 3. They do not pay attention to the need to consider students' personality traits and psychological needs as well as the timing when encouraging them; 4. When guiding students to start from daily homework to cultivate the accuracy of problem-solving and the standardization of solutions, they neglect the fact that teachers should first summarize the standardized steps of problem-solving; 5. When introducing game-based learning, they ignore the rationality of time arrangement and the importance of achieving learning goals; 6. They do not realize the significance of follow-up measures after having a conversation with students; 7. They overlook how to implement the results of communication with parents into actions after the communication. Therefore, the following suggestions are put forward: 1. Colleges and universities should add relevant courses in mathematics education-related majors to teach some practical and effective measures to improve students' mathematics scores to undergraduates and postgraduates in mathematics education majors; 2. Mathematics education-related majors in colleges and universities should add internship courses.