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New Zealand Students’ Mathematics-Related Beliefs and Attitudes: Recent Evidence

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Abstract

Internationally, associations between mathematics achievement and various beliefs and attitudes related to learning are well established. In this article, the findings of five studies are examined to identify patterns in New Zealand students’ mathematics-related beliefs and attitudes, and their relationships with achievement. Each study included an assessment of students’ beliefs and attitudes as well as their mathematics achievement, involved students in the 5 to 13-year-old range, and was reported in the 2009–2015 period. Students’ beliefs and attitudes were measured at various levels of specificity, ranging from beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, to confidence in their general mathematics ability, to task-specific mathematics self-efficacy judgments. It will be argued that using task-specific measures of students’ mathematics self-efficacy is of particular value for revealing a relationship between achievement and self-belief, and that teacher-implemented micro-interventions can be effective in strengthening both achievement and self-belief.

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Notes

  1. A school’s decile is an indicator of the proportion of students a school draws from low socio-economic communities, with decile 1 schools having the highest proportion and decile 10, the lowest.

  2. Units on the PAT: Mathematics scale are called patm units.

  3. For a more detailed report of this study, see Bonne and Johnston (2016).

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to my colleagues at NZCER, especially Cathy Wylie for her helpful comments on this article, and Sue McDowall and Rachel Felgate for their feedback.

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  1. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington, New Zealand

    Linda Bonne

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  1. Linda Bonne
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Correspondence to Linda Bonne.

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Bonne, L. New Zealand Students’ Mathematics-Related Beliefs and Attitudes: Recent Evidence. NZ J Educ Stud 51, 69–82 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-016-0035-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-016-0035-2

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