Abstract
The performance in mathematics at school level in South Africa is poor in comparison with other comparable middle-income countries, such as Botswana and Honduras. Many reasons could be provided for this situation, such as under-qualified mathematics teachers, changes in the curriculum, learners’ attitudes or, specific to this study, many teachers who do not take cognisance of learners’ values in mathematics. Learners have different cognitive and affective values, which could affect their levels of reasoning and performance in mathematics. Therefore, there is a need to have a clearer understanding of what learners value as important in the learning of mathematics. This study explored the values that grade 9 learners from a public school in the Ekurhuleni district of Gauteng associate with mathematics learning. Values are defined as preferences of individuals related to their personal standards of thoughts and actions that are meaningful to themselves. Specifically, values in mathematics are things that learners view as important and worthwhile in the learning of mathematics. Values influence the way learners choose to engage or not to engage with mathematical tasks. The theories which underpinned this study are the value theory in mathematics education of Bishop (1996), the cultural dimensions of Hofstede (1997) and Seah’s (2011b) three views on values, namely values are cognitive, affective and socio-cultural. The study adopted pragmatism as paradigm for the study. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 274 grade 9 learners from a school in Ekurhuleni district. The researcher used a standardised validated questionnaire to collect data. The biographical information and the 10 semantic differential items were quantitatively analysed using descriptive statistics, while the qualitative data from the two open-ended questions were inductively analysed. Lastly, the association between learners’ perceptions of how well they achieved in mathematics and what they valued was analysed employing Chi-square tests. From the findings, participants identified the following values to be important in the learning of mathematics: 1) Hard work and effort when doing mathematics; 2) Methods to obtain the answer to a mathematics problem; 3) Authentic examples of triangles to understand their properties; 4) Demonstration and explanation of mathematics concepts and proofs; and 5) Teaching and explanation of mathematics. This study contributes towards the infusion of values in the teaching and learning of mathematics in order to address poor mathematics performance.
M.A. (Education)