The Effect of Gender, Teaching Experience, Educational Background, and the School Type on Teachers’ Mathematical, Didactic, and Technological Competences

Abstract

Introduction. Many previous studies are increasingly rising the issue of teacher competences, specifically on content, didactics and technology. Those competences are considered as important aspects for successful teaching process in the classroom. Therefore, this study shed lights the effects of gender, teaching experience, educational background, and school types on teachers’ mathematical, didactic, and technological competences. Material and methods. The research method is an online survey of 145 elementary school teachers in Riau province, Indonesia (March to April 2022). The questionnaire consists of 15 questions in three competences: “mathematics”, “didactics”, and “technology”. To evaluate the effect of gender, teaching experience, educational background, and the school type on teachers’ competences, the researchers used a non-parametric statistical analysis of the Mann-Whitney U test. Results. The findings reveal that there were significant differences of teaching experiences (Asymp. Sig = 0.009, p<0.01) and school types (Asymp. Sig = 0.009, p<0.01) to teachers’ technological competence, also educational background to teachers’ mathematical (Asymp. Sig = 0.035, p<0.05) and didactic competences (Asymp. Sig = 0.012, p<0.05). However, only gender has no effect to any teacher competence. Conclusion. Gender is the only factor that does not affect teacher competences. Meanwhile, other factors, teaching experience, educational background, and school type, affect at least one out of three teacher competences. Therefore, these influencing aspects need to be the attention of policy makers in preparing elementary school teachers.

The Effect of Gender on Fifth-Grade Students’ Computational Thinking Skills

“…The gender issue is not only in CT but also in many aspects of mathematics education studies (Putra, Hermita, Afrillia, et al, 2022;Putra, Hermita, Yuliani et al, 2022;Reilly et al, 2019;Tambak et al, 2022). According to Reilly et al (2019), a large-scale study (TIMSS results from 2011) on the investigation of gender differences in mathematics and sciences found that, while there were no general worldwide gender disparities, female students outperformed male students' mathematics and science proficiency among non-OECD countries.…”

“…From several studies (Putra, Hermita, Afrillia, et al, 2022;Putra, Hermita, Yuliani, et al, 2022;Reilly et al, 2019;Tambak et al, 2022), it is still apparent that there is a debate between male and female competencies in CT and mathematics. Therefore, the present study is also interested in analyzing whether there were differences in students' CT skills regarding gender differences.…”