The Importance Of Attitudes In Mathematics

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Students' perceptions and attitudes towards teaching and learning mathematics play an important role in mathematics education (McLeod, 1989). The students learning outcomes are greatly related to their beliefs, perceptions, perspectives, and attitudes towards mathematics (Pehkonen, 2003). Evaluating and assessing students' mathematical knowledge and performance must be made with the awareness, recognition, and realization of their beliefs and perceptions. Systematic inquiry into students' attitudes and perceptions has grown a great deal during the last two decades and many countries have been included in the research (Lester, 2002).
Many educators tend to explain this phenomenon through the widespread perception and beliefs or mathematical
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Attitude plays an important role to achieve the objective in many things. When a person is unsuccessful in their life, many people said that he likely has negative thinking and bad attitude. In school, the teachers often state that the failure rate in subjects relates to the negative attitude such as laziness. Good attitude once formed are enduring and hard to change (Fishbein, 2000). The students' performance towards certain subjects depends on their attitude towards the subject. Positive attitude towards the subjects will encourage a person to understand the subject much better (Boon, …show more content…
From a cognitive point of view, it relates to a person's knowledge, beliefs, and other cognitive representations while from an affective domain it refers to a person's disposition, feelings, and emotions about mathematics. The term is also understood broadly to include all visual, verbal representations, metaphorical images and associations, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings related to mathematics. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to explore and identify the range of perceptions, beliefs, and dispositions towards mathematics as it is perceived by the

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