Definition
The construct of attitude has its roots in the context of social psychology in the early part of the twentieth century. In this context, attitude is considered as a state of readiness that exerts a dynamic influence upon an individual’s response (Allport 1935).
In the field of mathematics education, early studies about attitude towards mathematics already appeared in 1950, but in many of these studies the construct is used without a proper definition.
In 1992, McLeod includes attitude among the three factors that identify affect (the others are emotions and beliefs), describing it as characterized by moderate intensity and reasonable stability. But the definition of the construct remains one of the major issues in the recent research on attitude: as a matter of fact, there is no general agreement among scholars about the very nature of attitude.
Therefore, in this entry, the issue of the definition of attitude towards mathematics (and also of the consequent characterization...
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Zan, R., Di Martino, P. (2019). Students’ Attitude in Mathematics Education. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_146-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_146-4
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