Mathematics: the role of attitudes and beliefs
Supervisor: Patricia Cretchley
Description: Investigations into affective factors like emotions, attitudes and beliefs, and their relationship with development and achievement, have been neglected in education literature, generally. Yet there are strong reasons why for Mathematics in particular, they should be a major focus of research interest. Given the opportunity, people often espouse strong views on their school Mathematics learning experiences, and declare themselves to be either "good" or "bad" at Mathematics.Why is it that Mathematics, perhaps more than than any other subject, arouses strong emotional reaction in students, positive or negative? Is it the "right or wrong" nature of traditional types of exercises that encourages students to classify their mathematical ability on some very polarised scale, or are they simplifying a far more complex range of attitudes and beliefs? What is the range of deeper more entrenched attitudes and beliefs they have about themselves as learners, and about the nature of mathematics and how it should be learned? And are these views likely to affect the way they do, learn, or teach Mathematics in the future? It is commonly felt that a student's emotions, attitudes and beliefs are not only a result of past learning experiences, but that they will inevitably play a role also in the way he responds to new learning environments, and sensitive educators achieve healthy and productive learning experiences by seeking ways to balance the strong cognitive demands they want to make on students with sufficient affective reward so that the learning experience is both healthy and productive. This course looks at studies on beliefs about mathematics and the learning thereof, among both teachers and learners, and speculates on the role played by those attitudes. The Mandler-McCleod model of the affective domain is adopted: a hierarchy of emotions, attitudes and beliefs. A wide range of affective factors that may have influence learning is identified in the literature (for example, confidence, self-efficacy, motivation), existing instruments for assessing their levels are described, and the currently diverse and fragmented literature on affect is surveyed critically, with the aim of proposing methods and instruments for measuring levels of affective factors that will enable meaningful comparisons across a range of investigations.
Prerequisites: TBA
Main text: TBA
Some potential study topics
| What is Maths? Ron Addie | Attitude and belief Patricia Cretchley | Computer Algebra Ed Patricia Cretchley | Assessment issues Patricia Cretchley |
| Education research? Patricia Cretchley | Bridge gaps Patricia Cretchley | Gender equity Patricia Cretchley | Teaching geometry Patricia Cretchley |
| Math history Patricia Cretchley | Gen Lin Models Peter Dunn | Bayesian stats Paul Fahey | Survey sampling Ashley Plank |
| Maths Methods Tony Roberts | Quantum Computing Tony Roberts | Water waves Tony Roberts | Games theory Tony Roberts |
| Parallel numerics Tony Roberts | Hydro stability Sergey Suslov | Math Biology Sergey Suslov | Banach spaces Oleksiy Yevdokimov |
| Fundamental Maths Education Oleksiy Yevdokimov | Number history Oleksiy Yevdokimov |