Students' Beliefs about Mathematics: A Three-Year Study

In this article we describe a study in which 29 students in first through fourth grades at 1 school were interviewed each spring for 3 years to examine changes in their beliefs about learning and doing mathematics. Achievement data were also collected during the first year of the study. Interview questions were designed to indicate the stability of students' beliefs and to determine developmental trends in beliefs. Our data indicated that beliefs of most students were relatively stable assuming that environmental factors did not challenge beliefs (e. g., students tended to approve of cooperative learning only when their teachers used it). We also found that students had a narrow conception of the usefulness of mathematics, their perspectives on the value of group versus individual work reflected the variety of classroom environments to which they had been exposed, they had fairly accurate conceptions of their own achievement by third grade, and most had a tendency to like mathematics more as it became harder.