How Do Mathematics Students Go About Learning Mathematics? – A First Look

Abstract

In this chapter we investigate students’ views about learning mathematics. We continue our analysis of the interviews that we conducted with undergraduate mathematics majors at an Australian university. Here we move the focus to their ideas about how they go about studying mathematics. We present a theoretical model based on our research findings, aiming to build on and expand earlier descriptions of students’ learning approaches. While the small convenience sample that we have used for our interviews could limit the generalisability of our findings to the larger group of mathematics students as a whole, our results seem consistent with previous literature on student learning, and also with our findings about students’ conceptions of mathematics. We found that students’ conceptions of learning mathematics could be described using three hierarchical levels. At the narrowest level, students learned by focusing on the disparate techniques of mathematics. A broader level was represented by a focus on the subject of mathematics itself. In the most comprehensive view, students considered the role of mathematics in their lives and talked about developing a mathematical way of thinking and viewing the world, satisfying their intellectual curiosity and helping them to grow as a person. The hierarchical nature implies that students with the broadest ‘life’ conception of learning mathematics were also aware of the ‘subject’ and ‘techniques’ aspects, but those with the narrowest techniques conception did not seem to aware of the broader ideas. There seems to be an obvious parallel between these conceptions of learning mathematics and the conceptions of mathematics itself that we identified previously.