Prior research has revealed a variety of factors associated with teacher views around when to incorporate challenging mathematical tasks into instruction, such as teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and their prior assumptions about student ability. There has been less focus on how motivational beliefs (teacher anxiety, enjoyment, confidence) shape teachers’ views around teaching with challenging tasks. To address this gap, the current study administered questionnaires to Australian primary school teachers (n = 92) prior to them undertaking a professional learning programme focusing on teaching mathematics through sequences of challenging tasks. Employing logistic regression, we found that more teaching experience and lower levels of teacher anxiety teaching mathematics were associated with the view that challenging tasks should be introduced earlier in a student’s schooling. We also found that higher levels of teacher enjoyment substantially increased the likelihood that a teacher would endorse teaching with challenging tasks more than once a week; however, higher levels of teaching confidence somewhat reduced the likelihood. Implications for practice are discussed.

先前的研究揭示了与教师关于何时将具有挑战性的数学任务纳入教学的看法相关的各种因素，例如教师的教学内容知识以及他们先前对学生能力的假设。人们很少关注动机信念（教师焦虑、享受、自信）如何塑造教师对具有挑战性任务的教学的看法。为了解决这一差距，当前的研究对澳大利亚小学教师（n  = 92）进行了问卷调查，然后他们开始了专业学习计划，重点是通过一系列具有挑战性的任务来教授数学。采用逻辑回归，我们发现更多的教学经验和教师在数学教学中的焦虑水平较低与认为应在学生的学校教育中尽早引入挑战性任务的观点相关。我们还发现，较高水平的教师享受感大大增加了教师每周多次支持具有挑战性任务的教学的可能性；然而，较高水平的教学信心在一定程度上降低了这种可能性。讨论了对实践的影响。