Written evidence submitted by MathsWorldUK (DIV0016)

The UK is alone among the world’s 10 leading industrialised nations (China excepted) in having no public attraction dedicated to the discovery and celebration of mathematics.

MathsWorldUK aims to transform the UK public’s perception of mathematics - revealing the engaging, counterintuitive and surprising side of maths and empowering people to discover its power for themselves.

The core project objectives are:

• To create a world-class £20M visitor attraction in Leeds City Centre (which lacks any STEM visitor centre), that presents maths as playful, exciting, relevant and accessible

• To welcome 150,000+ children and families each year from diverse economic, social and cultural backgrounds and inspire them to discover, explore and enjoy mathematical thinking and ideas

• To build young people’s skills, confidence and interest in mathematics and their desire to learn more – particularly targeting those groups who face the greatest barriers in engaging with maths

• To explode negative perceptions of mathematics – among young people and the parents, carers and teachers who influence their career choices – through exciting challenges, surprising applications and inspiring role models

The problem

Mathematics is the gateway to STEM. In order to have good engagement across STEM we need good engagement with mathematics. The current perception of mathematics is an elitist subject which you are either good at or not. The UK is alone as perceiving maths as boring, difficult and irrelevant. This is a damaging perception.

There are far too few students continue with any mathematics beyond GCSE, and there are far too few students doing any mathematics courses at university to complement their chosen course of study. The result is that the UK does not produce a sufficient number of people with any mathematics qualifications beyond GCSE to cater for the economic and scientific needs of a country which claims to be one of the world’s leading economies.

Attitudes

In relation to mathematics, the beliefs may relate to the nature of mathematics (or at least ‘school mathematics’), to the way mathematics is taught, and to personal capability in mathematics, most often termed ‘self-efficacy ‘or simply confidence. The emotional end of the spectrum is usually known as ‘maths anxiety’. Somewhere around the centre of the spectrum would be such aspects as liking for maths, which have an affective as well as a cognitive basis but are longer term and more considered and not just temporary and emotional.

Clearly all points on this spectrum of attitudes, whether beliefs or emotions or somewhere in between, affect student willingness to engage in learning and hence their mathematical attainment, although exactly to what extent is difficult to measure, especially as causations go in both directions. In this summary I have not attempted to survey the literature, which would be a more substantial task, but only to focus on some key papers with quantitative data relating to England.  Although some are not very recent, it is not believed that they are still relevant to current conditions.

International surveys on attitudes

In international or other surveys, attitude data is often reduced to three areas: a) beliefs about the usefulness and/or importance of mathematics; b) mathematical confidence/self-efficacy; c) liking for mathematics. Here I will quote only from the most recent TIMSS results (2019) to be found at https://timss2019.org/reports/wp-content/themes/timssandpirls/download-center/classroom/T19_Ch11-student-attitudes.pdf The findings are based on students rating their degrees of agreement with 9 statements in each aspect.

In relation to beliefs about the importance of mathematics, including specifically how important they believed mathematics to be for their own futures, Year 9 students England came about mid-table with very similar scores to other anglophone countries, behind most developing countries and ahead of European and South East Asian states. There was a strong negative correlation between valuing mathematics and national attainment.

These results were broadly similar to those in the area of confidence in mathematics, assessed at both Years 5 and 9, with the exception that here European and Anglophone countries were much more widely spread; England came more than half way down the order of comparable  anglophone/European countries.

In relation to liking learning mathematics there was a significant contrast between England’s results for Years 5 and 9. The Year 5 results were again comparable to those for the importance of mathematics, with England in the top half and leading the anglophone and European countries. However at Year 9 we were well into the lowest quarter of the table, with among major countries only France, Norway, Hungary, high achieving South East Asian countries and, interestingly Finland, below us. Again the correlations between attainment and attitude were strongly negative, with only Singapore students seeming to manage to both like mathematics and attain well. These negative correlations are longstanding in international comparisons, and may relate to the comparative academic demands of  national curricula.

Attitudes in the early secondary school

One study which casts some light on why Key Stage 3 school students in England are so negative about their feelings about learning mathematics is that of Nardi and Steward (2003) who separated out distinct negative perceptions of school mathematics into tedious, isolated, rote learning, elitist, and de-personalised (T.I.R.E.D), noting the lack of engagement as a perceived characteristic, e.g. in mathematics there are “you just have to do it. It’s like a null period.” (Nardi and Steward. 2003, 361). These perceptions were attributed to the concentration on ‘teaching to the test’ and not enough emphasis on engaging and inspiring students. 

Attitudes and participation in post-16 mathematics

England is almost unique in allowing most students a choice as to whether or not to continue their study of mathematics post-16. Some insight into what leads many students to refuse this opportunity is provided by a questionnaire study with some free-response questions on a study of 1500 Year 11 students who had predicted grades of A*- C from 17 diverse schools just prior to their GCSE examinations (Brown, Brown & Bibby, 2008). The analysis supported findings that perceived difficulty and lack of confidence were important reasons for students not continuing with mathematics, and echoed Nardi and Steward in that dislike and boredom, and perceived lack of relevance, were also factors. There was a close relationship between reasons for non-participation and predicted GCSE grade, and a weaker relation to gender. An analysis of the effects of schools, controlling for predicted grade attainment, demonstrated that enjoyment of mathematics lessons was the main factor differentiating schools with high and low participation indices. It was worth noting that lack of confidence/perceived difficulty, although more associated with lower predicted grades, were also cited by students who were predicted to achieve an A*, for example:

…because I don’t feel maths is a natural skill – I have to learn it ‘by rote’ rather than completely understanding it. (female student predicted to get an A*)

The results also showed that students were sometimes discouraged from A-level study by teachers, and by older siblings and parents who, sometimes from personal experience, felt it would be too hard and/or boring.

It is worth noting that studies of undergraduate mathematics students (e.g. Rodd & Bartholomew, 2006) show that such attitudes are not confined to younger age-groups.

Maths Anxiety

The Year 11 study above identified that the word anxious  was selected by 35% of girls and 21% of boys to describe their feelings about mathematics. This is broadly in line with other studies which find that about 25% of the population feel significant anxiety about mathematics, with an additional 25% feeling anxious ‘sometimes’. Of this group such anxiety seems to be extreme in about 10% who are likely to say they ‘hate’ mathematics. Anxiety seems to increase with age peaking at the age of high stakes examinations and then gradually falling among older age groups. Dowker, Sarkar & Chung (2016) give a good summary of the maths anxiety research field. It is clear that anxiety is exacerbated by a variety of contexts e.g. public performance, examinations, time pressure. It seems likely that low attainment causes anxiety, but also that anxiety interferes with learning and performance. Studies of both school students and adults also identify particular areas of mathematics which cause anxiety (e.g. long division, fractions, algebraic manipulation). Participants often explain that this is because  they have not understood the basis of  the rules and have recourse to rote recall, which often fails.

Ways of improving attitudes to mathematics

The experiences of mathematics discovery centres abroad (which attract annual visitor numbers > 140, 000) evidence the impact of non-formal activities on the attitudes and learning processes of children and adults. These centres came together to collect the evidence which measures the impact of their work and produced the ‘mathspaces’ report.  [1]

The starting point of their study was the experimental sciences learning report by, J.H. Falk and L.D.Dierking[2] which states:

“Data from the Programme for International Student Assessment showed that a major predictor of high achievement on the test was participation in out-of-school, free-choice learning experiences such as visits to science museums.”

This is corroborated by the Harvard Family Research Project[3] “The dominant assumption behind much current educational policy and practice is that school is the only place where and when children learn. This assumption is wrong. Forty years of steadily accumulating research shows that out-of-school or “complementary learning” opportunities are major predictors of children’s development, learning and educational achievement. The research also indicates that economically and otherwise disadvantaged children are less likely than their more advantaged peers to have access to these opportunities. This inequity substantially undermines their learning and chances for school success.”

Given these findings we recently launched, MathsCity, in the central Trinity Leeds shopping centre. MathsCity occupies approx. 290m2 and features 22 medium to large exhibits and a further 10 smaller table-top activities: We believe that the part of the solution of improving engagement with maths (and hence STEM) lies outside schools and in informal settings.

January 2022

References

Brown, M., Brown, P. & Bibby, T. (2008) “I would rather die”: reasons given by 16-year-olds for not continuing their study of mathematics. Research in Mathematics Education, 10 (1), 3-18.

Dowker, A., Sarkar, A. & Chung Y.L. (2016) Mathematics anxiety: what have we learned in 60 years? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 508.

Nardi, E. and Steward, S. (2003). Is mathematics T.I.R.E.D? A profile of quiet disaffection in the secondary mathematics classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 29(3), 345–367. 

Rodd, M., & Bartholomew, H. (2006). Invisible and Special: young women?s experiences as undergraduate mathematics students. Gender and Education, 18 (1), 35-50.