Exploring High-Achieving Students’ Images of Mathematicians

Lower secondary students’ views about mathematicians depicted as mathematics teachers

“…Coding drawings: The coding began with reviewing a random subsample of drawings and recording the various aspects present in the drawings, and simultaneously reviewing past research to create a comprehensive list of the elements of the views about mathematicians pictured as mathematics teachers in student drawings. In particular I drew upon the work of Blake, Lesser and Scipio (2004), Aguilar et al (2016) and Losh et al (2008). To score students' drawings of mathematicians, Blake et al (2004) included gender (male, female, no gender), actions of main figure (e.g., teaching, working on problem, performing work), mathematics tools (e.g., books, blackboard, calculator, computer), equations (mathematical symbols, equation), and words (e.g., explaining action, mathematical words).…”

“…More recently, Aguilar et al (2016) described the images of mathematicians held by a group of 63 high-achieving Mexican students, from their pictorial and written descriptions. They reported that students mostly imagined a mathematician as a mathematics teacher and predominantly pictured mathematicians as male, dressed casually or formally, intelligent people who enjoyed their work and were passionate about mathematics.…”

“…For this study, I drew on DAMT which has been used around the world to research students' images of mathematics and/or views about mathematicians (e.g., Aguilar et al, 2016;Picker & Berry, 2000;Rock & Shaw, 2000;Stiles et al, 2008;Ucar et al, 2010). As previously described by Picker and Berry (2000), in this study students' drawings fell into two distinct groups: drawings that depicted their view of what a mathematician at work would look like (19.8%, n = 254), and drawings that depicted a mathematician who was clearly a mathematics teacher (70.5%, n = 905).…”

“…(Forgasz, Leder, & Tan, 2014, p. 369). Over time, much research has been published on the images of mathematics (e.g., Martin & Gourley-Delaney, 2014) and mathematicians (e.g., Aguilar, Rosas, Zavaleta, & Romo-Vázquez, 2016). This body of research shows that many students find mathematics boring (Stiles, Adkisson, Sebben, & Tamashiro, 2008), difficult, and complicated (Markovits & Forgasz, 2017).…”

“…Moreover, students appear to rely on some negative views about mathematicians (Picker & Berry, 2000), and have a lack of knowledge about the work of mathematicians (Latterell & Wilson, 2012;Picker & Berry, 2000;Rock & Shaw, 2000). Those student images significantly relate to their performance in (Wong, Marton, Wong, & Lam, 2002) and attitudes to mathematics (Aguilar et al, 2016). Furthermore, students who have negative images of mathematics (Latterell & Wilson, 2004) and know little about the work of mathematicians are less interested in pursuing mathematics (Latterell & Wilson, 2012;Piatek-Jimenez, 2008) or math-related careers (Piatek-Jimenez, Cribbs, & Gill, 2018).…”