To browse Academia. Pupils' beliefs -components of the affective domain that are mainly cognitive in nature and developed over a long period of time -are in the literature pointed out to be related to several educational factors in mathematics education, for example to problem solving behaviour, achievement in mathematics and pupils' decisions of choosing further mathematics courses. The main aim of this research has been to explore Estonian and Norwegian pupils' beliefs about mathematics, its teaching and learning.
The data collection tools in the study are a Likert scale questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The emphasise is on clarifying the structure of beliefs and the relationships between different factors in the belief system, as well as the general tendencies in pupils' answers about their beliefs in mathematics.
The comparative part of the study includes comparing different results from different studies, age groups, and gender. Discussing the terminology and statistical procedures used when researching beliefs in mathematics education using a Likert scale has also been one of the goals for this study. Comparing English and Norwegian pupils' attitude towards mathematics, in this article I develop a deeper understanding of the factors. A survey study was conducted to investigate the nature of students' mathematics-related belief systems.
A mathematics-related beliefs questionnaire was developed and administered to Flemish junior high school students to gather data to identify and analyze the different components of students' belief systems. The focus was on the structure of the belief systems and the relevant categories of beliefs and the ways they relate to each other. Analysis of the nature and structure of beliefs and belief systems points to the social context, the self, and the object to which the beliefs relate as constitutive of the development and functioning of the systems.
The developed questionnaire, the Mathematics-Related Beliefs Questionnaire contained 58 items scored on a 6-point scale. The four-factor model resulting from a principal components analysis of survey responses shows that there is some empirical ground for the proposed structure of students' mathematics-related beliefs. Factor 1 refers to the social context, factor 2 to certain beliefs about the self.
