Kristina Juter

Students' Attitudes to Mathematics and Performance in Limits of Functions

The main aim of this article is to discuss the attitudes to mathematics of students taking a basic mathematics course at a Swedish university, and to explore possible links between how well such students manage to solve tasks about limits of functions and their attitudes. Two groups, each of about a hundred students, were investigated using questionnaires, field notes and interviews. From the results presented a connection can be inferred between students’ attitudes to mathematics and their ability to solve limit tasks. Students with positive attitudes perform better in solving limit problems. The educational implications of these findings are also discussed.

Does High Achieving in Mathematics = Gifted and/or Creative in Mathematics?

A student at a university, let us call him John, was always the first to answer questions posed by the teacher. Problems that took 15 minutes for his peers to solve took him a split second. John attended all compulsory lectures, but he did not do all compulsory tasks and hence did not pass the course. He was always late and not very focused on the course, other than on occasional problems posed by his teacher. He saw mathematical relations but was not particularly interested in the university setting and he did not adjust to it which led him to fail the course. He was clearly mathematically gifted, and a creative thinker in his ability to see solutions to problems quickly, but in the course statistics, he would be regarded a low achieving student. This conflicting scenario leads to several questions.

A Framework to Explore the Role of Mathematics During Physics Lessons in Upper-Secondary School

This chapter discusses a framework for analysing the role of mathematics during physics lessons in upper-secondary school. It takes as a starting point that relations made during physics lessons be ...