The impact of teaching practices, professional profile and continuous training of mathematics teachers on the high school dropout rate

Abstract

The aim of this research was to analyze the influence of mathematics teaching practices, the teacher’s professional profile and their continuous training, as factors that influence students’ academic failure and dropout rates in high school. A single case study was undertaken, with mixed data collection techniques. An intentional sample of eight teachers of first-year mathematics was used, due to the higher failure rate in this subject. The results pointed to limited teaching strategies, the teacher’s professional profile being mostly in engineering, with a few teachers with graduate studies and marginal teacher training. We concluded that it is important that teachers master the syntactic knowledge of mathematics in addition to the substantial one, that they have a graduate degree and that they develop skills for the teaching of mathematics, as influential factors to reduce the dropout rate at this level of education.