Students' perceptions of knowing and loving mathematics as reflected from their drawings

Abstract

The aim of this study is to clarify the images that the primary school students have of knowing/not knowing and loving/not loving mathematics as reflected from their drawings. Draw-A-Man Test-DAM (Goodenough, 1926) and Draw-A-Scientist Test- DAST (Chambers, 1983) gave birth to “Draw-A-Student who knows/not know/loves/not loves Mathematics Test-DASMT” which then used in order to measure students’ perceptions of knowing/not knowing and loving/not loving mathematics. The sample of the study consists of 72 female and 97 male students (N=169) of Orbay Primary School from different grade levels. Results indicated that there are 60 images drawn by the students to reflect their perceptions of knowing/not knowing and loving/not loving mathematics. Baykal’s (1978) “system view of instructional process” was utilized to describe and explain these images. Based on the system view, some of the images were described as an indicator of major components of the instructional system which are “objectives”, “social settings”, “physical settings”, “instructional media”, “instructional procedure”, and “teacher”. The images with high frequencies and not described with system view, were explained as the finer discriminations which were the images “smiles”, “sadness”, and “question mark” in this study. Lastly, the discriminations between the cognitive aspects of mathematics (knowing and not knowing) and affective aspects of mathematics (loving and not loving); and between positive standings of mathematics (knowing and loving) and negative standings of mathematics (not knowing and not loving) were examined. In conclusion, the results indicated that the students do not have a system view in reflecting knowing, not knowing, loving, and not loving mathematics, in fact, they individualized it.