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Dimensions of students’ views of themselves as learners of mathematics

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Abstract

Students’ views of themselves as learners of mathematics are a decisive parameter for their engagement and success in school. We are interested in students’ experiences with mathematics encompassing cognitive, emotional and motivational aspects. In particular, we focus on capturing the structural properties of affect related to mathematics. Participants in our study were 1,436 randomized chosen students of secondary schools from overall Finland. In the Finnish upper secondary school, there are two different syllabi for mathematics: the general and the advanced one. Schools were invited to organize the survey by one of their year 2 general syllabus courses and one of their year 2 advanced syllabus courses in grade 11. By means of factor analysis, we obtained seven dimensions in which students’ hold beliefs and emotions about mathematics partly intertwined with their motivational orientations. These dimensions are described by reliable scales, which allow outlining an average image of Finnish students’ views of themselves as learners of mathematics. Moreover, we analyzed relations between the seven dimensions and what kind of structure they generate. Thereby, a core of three high correlating dimensions could be identified, yielding different accentuations with regard to course choice.

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Notes

  1. http://www.oph.fi/english.

  2. The data are relatively normally distributed; skew < 2, kurtosis < 7 (Fabrigar et al., 1999).

  3. An additionally conducted principal components analysis led to nearly the same factorization so that our solution can be viewed as method-invariant.

  4. Even if communality of an item is low, it can be reliable, provided that a factor is measuring a variable very broadly (Bühner, 2004). We, therefore, chose to only exclude items with very low communality.

  5. As the best fit for the data, we looked for item loadings above .30 with no or few items crossloadings and a minimum of three items per factor.

  6. In the oblique solutions for each of these factors, those items were suppressed with absolute values less than .3 because their common variance with the factor is less than 10%.

  7. The scale values for the dimensions are calculated as follows: ((sum of scale values for the items of a factor) × 10/(amount of items of the factor) − 10) × 5/4.

  8. Significance was tested by t test.

  9. Correlation matrix: **correlation is significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Mathematics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Bettina Roesken

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Markku S. Hannula & Erkki Pehkonen

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  1. Bettina Roesken
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  2. Markku S. Hannula
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  3. Erkki Pehkonen
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Correspondence to Bettina Roesken.

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Roesken, B., Hannula, M.S. & Pehkonen, E. Dimensions of students’ views of themselves as learners of mathematics. ZDM Mathematics Education 43, 497–506 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-011-0315-8

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