It matters which class you are in: student-centred teaching and the enjoyment of learning mathematics

Abstract

The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey highlighted how attitudes to mathematics had declined sharply for students in many of the high attaining countries in the survey, England being no exception. There is a notable drop in positive attitudes to mathematics between 9 and 14, as well as a remarkable decline for 14 year olds over time. This paper explores survey data collected from over 3000 11-year-olds in 16 schools during 2008 with the goal of exploring possible factors that might be contributing to this attitudinal decline. The association between student-centred teaching and enjoyment of learning mathematics is reported as part of a multi-scale analysis that shows the extent to which student experiences differ between schools and between classes within schools.

Keywords:

• grouping
• learner attitudes
• student-centred pedagogy
• classroom culture

Acknowledgement

The Geographies of Mathematical Attainment and Participation project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-061-25-0035).

Notes

1. Students citing maths as their least favourite subject are more likely to have lower prior attainment. For example, of the boys in this sample obtaining level 3/4/5 (the latter being the highest available at the time) in the Key Stage test for 11 year olds, there were 32/20/11 percent reporting maths as least favourite. The comparable data for girls is 33/26/16 percent. There is no suggestion of a causal relationship here.

2. Although what I have called ‘scales’ have acceptably high Cronbach's alphas (>0.7), the analysis is undertaken in the knowledge that a high ‘score’ is not a guarantee of unidimensionality (see Field 2005, 668, for a discussion). The sets of items were designed as scales, and factor analysis does not identify a more complex factor structure.

3. Each of the scales was tested for normality in SPSS using standard tests: Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilkinson. Under both tests, all three scales used in the analysis (teacher quality, class culture, student-centred) were significant (p < 0.01) at student level. This indicates deviation from the normal distribution. However, as pointed out by Field (2005, 93), large sample sizes can lead to significant deviations from normality when in fact the distribution is close enough to be assumed normal. Closer inspection of Normal Q-Q plots for the three scales suggests sufficient alignment with the normal distribution for the purposes of this paper. In contrast, when the class-level means of these scales scores are calculated and tested, they are not significantly different (p > 0.05) from the normal distribution.