“Creature” Teachers “Monster” Mathematicians: Students’ Views about Mathematicians and Their Stated Attitudes to Mathematics
Keywords:
Image of mathematics Views about mathematicians Stated attitudes about mathematicsAbstract
The present study aimed to examine lower secondary students’ images of mathematics comprised of stated attitudes to and perceived needs for mathematics, and their views about mathematicians and their work. A group of 1284 lower secondary students drew a picture of mathematicians and described their drawings. The students’ drawings fell into two distinct groups: drawings where students depicted a mathematician at work, and drawings where students depicted a mathematician as a mathematics teacher. In both cases students drew both negative (“creature” or “monster”) depictions and positive (“smiley”) depictions. This article presents the data on “creature” teachers or “monster” mathematicians in relation to the students’ stated attitudes to mathematics. Trends that emerged for this sample suggested that more students who represented creature teachers disliked mathematics or had mixed feelings related to the need to learn mathematics.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Authors alone are responsible for the contents of their articles. The journal owns the copyright of the articles. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of the research material.
The author(s) of a manuscript agree that if the manuscript is accepted for publication in the journal, the published article will be copyrighted using a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license. This license allows others to freely copy, distribute, and display the copyrighted work, and derivative works based upon it, under certain specified conditions.
Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission to include any images or artwork for which they do not hold copyright in their articles, or to adapt any such images or artwork for inclusion in their articles. The copyright holder must be made explicitly aware that the image(s) or artwork will be made freely available online as part of the article under a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
