What do students’ feel about mathematics? : Compulsory school students’ emotions and motivation towards mathematics

This licentiate thesis deals with compulsory school students’ expressed emotions and motivation towards mathematics. Theoretically, it has been guided by Hannula’s meta-theory on affect (e.g., 2012), of which emotion and motivation are part. In this thesis, emotion is defined using models from Schirmer (2015), and motivation correspondingly by Shunk et al. (2010). In the analysis, a model for emotion developed by Lövheim (2012), and models for motivation proposed by Ryan & Deci (e.g., 2000) and later further developed by Sumpter (2012), were adopted. This thesis focuses on two studies. In the first study, in search of nuanced knowledge about students’ experiences of mathematics, a primarily qualitative approach was adopted in interviews conducted with 19 primary school students. The results reported in Paper I (Nyman & Sumpter, 2019) confirm previous research which found that students express both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for doing mathematics. But the results also indicate further motivational nuances, and I propose a division of each dimension into six subcategories. The results reported in Paper II (Nyman, in press) indicate that students’ negative emotions towards mathematics are directed towards themselves, as shame or distress, and not externally as anger. The results also indicate that there are connections between emotion and other affective concepts such as motivation and social dimensions, but also more technical aspects, for example, being allowed to listen to music. The second study, reported in Paper III (in preparation), gathered questionnaire data from 222 grade 8 and grade 9 students, and aimed to compare differences between the two grades as well as between boys and girls. The results show that the only significant difference between boys and girls is on issues relating to motivation: Girls generally express being more extrinsically motivated to doing mathematics than boys