Practitioner research in education helps us better understand effective pedagogy and practices. Indeed, it is practitioner curiosity that often drives our research. However, does the situatedness of mathematics practitioners predispose them towards a mathematical research approach that misses the bigger picture?

As a mathematics education researcher, I have faced the challenge of moving away from my natural positivist standpoint. My current research examines the experiences of children learning mathematics outdoors (see Barrett-Rodger et al., 2022). While this research calls for me to adopt an interpretive approach to the study, the mathematician within me yearns to look at the problem numerically. Therefore, in this blog post, I discuss the tension between the perspectives of the majority of mathematics education researchers and what that might be leading us to miss.

Attending the Practitioner Research in Mathematics Education (PRiME) event earlier in the year, I was inspired by my fellow practice-based researchers’ valuable research. However, I came away with the distinct impression that most of the delegates approached their research in a very quantitative way – as you may expect of mathematicians. Of the many presentations at the conference, it appeared my research was the only entirely qualitative study, and I soon found that purely qualitative studies in mathematics education were rare. Bakker and colleagues’ (2021) survey conducted for the Educational Studies in Mathematics journal asked the global academic mathematics community what future studies should focus on. The report lists methodologies appropriate for mathematics education research. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all approaches are quantitative or mixed methods, highlighting the dominance of positivism in mathematics education research.

‘I left the PRiME event with the distinct impression that most of the delegates approached their research in a very quantitative way – as you may expect of mathematicians.’

For example, one area of mathematics education research that has growing attention is the study of mathematics anxiety (MA) which can be described as ‘a feeling of tension, apprehension or even dread’ of mathematics (Ashcraft & Faust, 1994, p. 98). Searching databases for articles and books on MA reveals an almost obsessive attempt to measure it numerically rather than to understand it qualitatively. The MA Rating Scale (MARS) (Richardson & Suinn, 1972) and later adaptations are widely used to measure anxiety in mathematics-related situations. This has proved helpful over the past half a century as many researchers have employed it to understand what factors can influence MA and what potential impacts MA could have on individuals (see for example Namkung et al., 2019; Lu et al., 2021). Tools such as MARS brilliantly help us to know the what and the why of mathematics anxiety, but they miss the importance of the how – demonstrating that even when exploring a condition that has been shown to have a significant impact on an individual’s feelings and emotions, most research focuses on different ways of measuring it rather than trying to understand how it is experienced. While there are notable exceptions (such as Carey et al.’s 2019 study of children’s experiences with MA), research into the experience of mathematics in a purely qualitative way is far less common. Although I understand that measurable research outcomes potentially have more clout in our data-driven society, I believe that the predisposition of mathematics practitioners leads to a focus on measurable, quantitative research in mathematics education research, and thereby overlooks a deeper understanding of the impact our pedagogy and practices have on the lived experiences of mathematics learners.

‘Tools such as the MA Rating Scale brilliantly help us to know the what and the why of mathematics anxiety, but they miss the importance of the how.’

While I have adopted hermeneutic phenomenology to glimpse how children experience learning mathematics outdoors, the temptation to measure and apply mathematical reasoning has enticed me back to the relative safety of numbers. However, to realise my study’s aim requires me to move away from my positivist inclinations. My research reveals that outdoor mathematics lessons can relieve learners’ stress and burdens of the ‘real world’. This insight has been gained through in-depth phenomenological analysis and would likely have been overlooked if examined quantitatively.

I aim not to pit positivism and interpretivism against one another but to promote an alternative perspective, moving us beyond our mathematics tendencies. In doing so, I call for more purely qualitative approaches to be used in mathematics education research to understand learners’ experiences to inform policy and practice. We should ask ourselves: If we always consider mathematics learning only from a mathematics perspective, what are we missing?

References

Ashcraft, M. H., & Faust, M. W. (1994). Mathematics anxiety and mental arithmetic performance: An exploratory investigation. Cognition and Emotion, 8(2), 97–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939408408931

Bakker, A., Cai, J., & Zenger, L. (2021). Future themes of mathematics education research: An international survey before and during the pandemic. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 107(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-021-10049-w 

Barrett-Rodger, L., Goldspink, S., & Engward, H. (2022). Being in the wood: Using a presuppositional interview in hermeneutic phenomenological research. Qualitative Research, 23(4), 1062–1077. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941211061055

Carey, E., Devine, A., Hill, F., Dowker, A., McLellan, R., & Szucs, D. (2019). Understanding mathematics anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. Centre for Neuroscience in Education. https://www.neuroscience.ox.ac.uk/publications/1118239 

Lu, Y., Li, Q., Patrick, H., & Mantzicopoulos, P. (2021). ‘Math gives me a tummy ache!’ Mathematics anxiety in kindergarten. Journal of Experimental Education, 89(2), 362–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2019.1680518 

Namkung, J. M., Peng, P., & Lin, X. (2019). The relation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance among school-aged students: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 89(3), 459–496. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654319843494

Richardson, F. C., & Suinn, R. M. (1972). The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale: Psychometric data. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 19(6), 551–554. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033456