Affect and Mathematics Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030137618
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

10.1.2 Valuing Mathematics and Valuing Attributes of Mathematics

There are two aspects to values and valuing in mathematics education. One is concerned with valuing mathematics, that is, an individual regarding the discipline as important. The other aspect operates independently of the first one, and is concerned with an individual having convictions with particular attributes of the discipline and/or its pedagogy.

Two studies in this section exemplify the first aspect. In one, Zonnefeld’s teaching of growth mindset to undergraduates over a period of 12 months resulted in the female students valuing statistics much more than their male peers and also performing better than their male peers. This suggests a very significant relationship amongst the variables of values, gender, and performance. That this is in favour of female students further validates the importance of working with the notion of values, in terms of how this approach to mathematics education may empower female students’ self-efficacy or confidence in being successful in understanding and performing in mathematics at school. In the other study, Bofah and Hannula’s analysis of the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study [TIMSS] data (Thomson, Hillman, & Wernert, 2012) for five African countries included an assessment of students’ valuing of mathematics. Importantly, the study found that amongst the various factors analysed, “the association between perceived social support and achievement is accounted for entirely or partly by how the students value and like mathematics”. It needs to be mentioned, though, that Bofah and Hannula’s notion of mathematics valuing was as a motivational belief in the tradition of the expectancy-value theory, and thus it has some utility flavour.

Individuals’ valuing of attributes of mathematics and/or its pedagogy is also evident in this section. In Middleton, Mangu, and Lee’s analysis of the responses of some 24,000 United States students when they were in the 9th grade and then when they were in the 11th grade two years later, one of the motivation scales was ‘effort’. Here, the extent to which a student emphasises the role of effort in studying mathematics may be regarded as an expression of his/her mathematics educational value, that is, a value that is concerned with an aspect of the process of learning mathematics (Bishop, 1996). In this study, “effort, interestingly decreased across all [four] categories of students, and was especially low for” the group of students who did not intend to pursue a STEM career, and for the group of students who had the intention in the 9th grade but no longer so two year later.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.