Investigating students’ positive relationships with mathematics

For decades, mathematics education research has addressed the topic of students’ emotional relationships with mathematics through studies of “attitude” and “disposition”. However, this research tends to focus on students who have negative relationships with the subject area and often places students in a deficit model (Brahier & Speer, 2011). In this presentation, we will discuss a group of students that is underexamined in the literature – those who report having a positive relationship with mathematics (i.e., students who claim to like mathematics and/or feel confident in their abilities) – and identify factors that contribute to those feelings. This presentation will focus on a portion of a large-scale, ongoing study that seeks to understand students’ lived experiences learning mathematics in Canadian schools. The study is framed by enactivist theory, which emphasizes the interrelationship of cognition and emotion in learning and troubles the positioning of self and identity as static, individual phenomena (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). As per our narrative inquiry methodological framework (Clandinin, 2007), the study’s data include artistic renderings, autobiographical interviews, and written mathematics autobiographies. This paper draws on a dataset comprised of 94 autobiographical interviews with Kindergarten to Grade 9 students in the Canadian province of Alberta. Analysis included emergent and thematic coding of both the interview transcripts and associated drawings related to questions about participants’ feelings about doing mathematics. Our findings show that many of the younger students were unable to articulate the reasons for their positive feelings, but when offered, such reasons tended to relate to external validation, such as feeling “smart” and getting good grades, since mathematics was easy for them. In some cases, parental support was an important contributing factor to the participants’ positive feelings. Interestingly, notions of mathematics as being intrinsically enjoyable were rarely provided by any age group. Our presentation will include a critical analysis of examples from the interviews and a discussion of how our findings might be applied to help increase the proportion of students who develop positive relationships with mathematics.