Mathematics, Affect and Learning: Middle School Students’ Beliefs and Attitudes About Mathematics Education

This book examines the beliefs, attitudes, values and emotions of students in Years 5 to 8 (aged 10 to 14 years) about mathematics and mathematics education. Fundamentally, this book focuses on the development of affective views and responses towards mathematics and mathematics learning. Furthermore, it seems that students develop their more negative views of mathematics during the middle school years (Years 5 to 8), and so here we concentrate on students in this critical period. The book is based on a number of empirical studies, including an enquiry undertaken with 45 children in Years 5 and 6 in one school; a large-scale quantitative study undertaken with students from a range of schools across diverse communities in New Zealand; and two related small-scale studies with junior secondary students in Australia. This book brings substantial, empirically-based evidence to the widely held perception that many students have negative views of mathematics, and these affective responses develop during the middle years of school. The data for this book were collected with school students, and students who were actually engaged in learning mathematics in their crucial middle school years. The findings reported and discussed here are relevant for researchers and mathematics educators, policy makers and curriculum developers, and teachers and school principals engaged in the teaching of mathematics.

Associate Professor Peter Grootenboer was a school teacher and leader for 12 years before moving into the tertiary sector. He received a national Jim Campbell Award for teaching excellence. He is now an Associate Professor in Education at Griffith University and a member of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research. His research interests include mathematics education, educational leadership, practice/praxis theory, and issues of social justice.

Dr Margaret Marshman worked as a hospital physicist, in laser physics and mathematical modelling for magnetic resonance imaging before becoming a secondary Mathematics and Science teacher and Mathematics Head of Department on the Gold Coast. She is involved in teacher education in the Graduate Diploma and undergraduate programs and has been involved in the professional development of practitioners through post-graduate programs. She is particularly interested in how students formulate and solve mathematical and scientific problems and also publishes in other areas of mathematical investigations, collaborative learning, middle schooling and mathematics and science education.