Teachers' conceptions about students' mathematical reasoning : Gendered or not?

This study looks at how upper secondary school teachers gender stereotype aspects of students' mathematical reasoning. Girls were attributed gender symbols including insecurity, use of standard methods and imitative reasoning. Boys were assigned the symbols such as multiple strategies especially on the calculator, guessing and chance-taking. 

Prospective teachers’ conceptions of what characterize a gifted student in mathematics

This paper explores Swedish prospective teachers’ conceptions of what characterise a gifted student in mathematics. This was studied through a qualitative questionnaire focusing on attributions. The results show that a majority of the students attribute intrinsic motivation to gifted students, more often than extrinsic motivation. Other themes were other affective factors (e.g. being industrious), cognitive factors (e.g. easy to learn), and social factors such as good behaviour and background.

On Aspects of Mathematical Reasoning : Affect and Gender

This thesis explores two aspects of mathematical reasoning: affect and gender. I started by looking at the reasoning of upper secondary students when solving tasks. This work revealed that when not guided by an interviewer, algorithmic reasoning, based on memorising algorithms which may or may not be appropriate for the task, was predominant in the students reasoning. Given this lack of mathematical grounding in students reasoning I looked in a second study at what grounds they had for different strategy choices and conclusions. This qualitative study suggested that beliefs about safety, expectation and motivation were important in the central decisions made during task solving.  But are reasoning and beliefs gendered? The third study explored upper secondary school teachers conceptions about gender and students mathematical reasoning. In this study I found that upper secondary school teachers attributed gender symbols including insecurity, use of standard methods and imitative reasoning to girls and symbols such as multiple strategies especially on the calculator, guessing and chance-taking were assigned to boys. In the fourth and final study I found that students, both male and female, shared their teachers view of rather traditional feminities and masculinities. Remarkably however, this result did not repeat itself when students were asked to reflect on their own behaviour: there were some discrepancies between the traits the students ascribed as gender different and the traits they ascribed to themselves. Taken together the thesis suggests that, contrary to conceptions, girls and boys share many of the same core beliefs about mathematics, but much work is still needed if we should create learning environments that provide better opportunities for students to develop beliefs that guide them towards well-grounded mathematical reasoning. 

The physical classroom environment : roles, conceptions, and preferences

The problem addressed in this thesis is that a considerable proportion of students around the world attend school in inadequate facilities, which is detrimental for the students’ learning outcome. The overall objective in this thesis is to develop a methodology, with a novel approach to involve teachers, to generate a valuable basis for decisions regarding design and improvement of physical school environment, based on the expressed needs for a specific school, municipality, or district as well as evidence from existing research. Three studies have been conducted to fulfil the objective: (1) a systematic literature review and development of a theoretical model for analysing the role of the physical environment in schools; (2) semi structured interviews with teachers to get their conceptions of the physical school environment; (3) a stated preference study with experimental design as an online survey. Wordings from the transcripts from the interview study were used when designing the survey form. The aim of the stated preference study was to examine the usability of the method when applied in this new context of physical school environment. The result is the methodology with a mixed method chain where the first step involves a broad investigation of the specific circumstances and conceptions for the specific school, municipality, or district. The second step is to use the developed theoretical model and results from the literature study to analyse the results from the first step and transform them in to a format that fits the design of a stated preference study. The final step is a refined version of the procedure of the performed stated preference study.