Using students’ selection of significant events in mathematics lessons to deduce their underlying predispositions

Abstract

Learners’ perspectives on classroom teaching have been explored in various ways. Within the context of past research, the student voice approach has shown the potential of making teaching and learning more effective. This article reports on students’ perceptions with the aim of revealing their predispositions in the sense of Bruner’s perceptual set theory concerning mathematics lessons. By asking students about significant events in specific mathematics lessons they attended and their associated justifications, insights into students’ predispositions (beliefs) about teaching and learning mathematics are gained. We were able to reconstruct a wide range of predispositions, which indicate both a view on mathematics education that is quite positive and as well a willingness to learn comprehensively. As a further result, we obtained information about which kinds of scenes are perceived as significant by students, which was then linked to their decisive predispositions. With our results in mind, teachers could react appropriately to the expectations of students related to these predispositions and thus avoid dissatisfaction and barriers to learning.