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The Impact of Experience on Elementary School Teacher Affective Relationship with Mathematics
Abstract
This study was designed as an exploratory examination of the impact of teaching experience on elementary school teachers’ affective relationships with mathematics. A self-reporting survey was used to examine a wide variety of experience factors, including factors related to quantity of experience, type of experience, and post-certification training opportunities (n = 275). Participants were also asked to identify services that might impact their affective relationships with mathematics. This study resulted in recommendations for seven follow-up studies to gain insight into factors that significantly correlated to teacher attitudes toward math or to their perceived changes in attitudes over time. Recommended practices for school districts and Education Service Agencies were also given. iii
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Affect has been studied from different perspectives: as subjective experience, as physiological process and as social communication. In mathematics education the main concepts that have been used are emotion, attitude, beliefs, values, and motivation. The aim of this research has been to increase the coherence of the theoretical foundation for the role of affect in mathematical thinking and learning. A special emphasis has been placed on understanding the dynamic aspects of affect: how affect influences the different learning processes and how different experiences influence the development of affect.
The theoretical background of the analyses is based on cognition, emotion, and motivation, which are seen within a framework of self-regulation. Cognition is seen to be connectionist and embodied, motivation is conceptualised as a structure of needs and goals, and emotion is seen to have three readouts: physiology, subjective experience and expressive behaviour. The approach acknowledges the importance of unconscious regulation and the existence of multiple regulative mechanisms.
The thesis is a combination of theoretical and empirical work. The empirical work is based on a qualitative longitudinal study in two classrooms.
The main results of this work are the following:
1) A conceptualisation of the metalevel of affect-cognition interaction (metacognition, emotional cognition, cognitive emotion, and metaemotion).
2) A critical reconceptualisation of the concept attitude, which is seen as an amalgam of several evaluative processes: situational emotions, automated emotions, expected outcomes, and the value of the relevant goals.
3) Identification of cognitive intimacy – a kind of shared ‘flow’ – as an important aspect of the social dimension of affect in learning.
4) Elaboration of the use of fiction writing as a method of analysis and reporting in qualitative studies.
Key words: mathematics, affect, emotion, attitude, beliefs, motivation, meta-affect, fiction writing
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