The Metaverse in mathematics education: The opinions of secondary school mathematics teachers

Abstract

With the Covid 19 pandemic, technology-supported applications have been quickly integrated into education. At this point, Metaverse will inevitably be involved in the education sector. The need to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and awareness of our teachers, the practitioners of education, about the concept of metaverse has arisen. The convergent parallel mixed method, which allows simultaneous collection of quantitative and qualitative data, was used. 70 mathematics teachers who teach in different regions of Türkiye and secondary schools, selected by the easily accessible case sampling method, participated in the study. A semi-structured form prepared by the researchers was used to collect the data. The first part of the interview form is the "Metaverse Scale" and the second part is one closed-ended and three open-ended questions. Quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics included in and t-test for independent samples, while qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. Teachers' opinions about the availability of the Metaverse in mathematics education are generally positive, and they indicate that it can be used mainly for concretization, geometry and they find it useful. The reasons for the lack of research on the concept of the Metaverse are themed as personal reasons, negative attitudes, Metaverse-related causes, and lack of resources, and explanations are made mostly for personal reasons. Knowledge, attitudes, and awareness scores regarding the concept of metaverse do not differ significantly by gender; female and male mathematics teachers have similar views, The results of the research also shed light on the future of students studying in different conditions in different regions of the country following the opinions of mathematics teachers who perform their duties in different regions of Türkiye.