A Study of Attitudes Towards Mathematics in Relation to Selected Student Characteristics

SUMMARY. Attitudes towards mathematics of over 300 first‐year sixth‐form students were studied in relation to the type of mathematics curriculum previously followed by them, to their choice of sixth‐form courses and the students' intelligence, personality and mathematical achievement. The main findings are that no significant differences in liking for mathematics and in views about the difficulty of learning mathematics were found between students who had followed a ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ mathematics curriculum, but that attitudes to mathematics were strongly correlated with students' mathematical bias as inferred from their choice of sixth‐form subjects. As an additional aspect of the study, students' preferences for different modes of presenting mathematical information were examined, with three presentation modes being used: symbolic, graphical and verbal. Students' mathematical bias was found to be strongly associated with preference for the symbolic communication mode and anti‐preference for the verbal mode.