Hope collection

How can students’ lived maths experiences guide confident, well-aligned choices about advanced maths?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Help students reflect on feelings and thinking derived from their learning experiences related to mathematics, recognising that subject choice is an evolving process influenced by ongoing feelings and reflections.

• Create supportive, challenging environments where students can safely share ideas and enjoy mathematics collaboratively, boosting engagement and confidence in subject choices.

• Acknowledge family, peer, and school influences; help students balance personal goals and external expectations through open communication and negotiation skills.

• Build strong teacher-student relationships to support students especially for those who doubts about their maths abilities through tailored encouragement and guidance.

• Encourage ongoing reflection so students can reinterpret past and new learning experiences in school mathematics, adapting their subject choices as their understanding and interests develop.

Abstract

This prospective study adopted Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie to examine students’ lived experiences in learning mathematics and how they were related to subject choice plans and actual decisions. Most research has considered students’ mathematics subject choice as a decision predictable using important cognitive and social variables. Due attention has not been given to examining how students’ lived experiences in learning mathematics relate and contribute to their subject choice plans and decisions over time. Perezhivanie is a psychological structure for understanding dynamic influences derived from personal and contextual sources. In this study, two case studies were crafted using multiple data sources including interviews, observations, surveys and fieldnotes collected over three years on two achieving students who had studied in the same class. Despite this shared context, their perezhivanija differed, revealing complex dynamic interplay between factors derived from personal and external realms. This study described the

identified perezhivanija of these two students and explained how they were related to their subject choice plans and their eventual subject choice decisions. The findings revealed that perezhivanija, including both heightened experiences and meta-experiences, were vital personal sources informing subject choice plans and decisions.

Full paper access

Ng, Clarence. (2021). Subject choice and perezhivanie in mathematics: A longitudinal case study. Educational Studies in Mathematics. 107(3), pp. 547-563. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-021-10050-3. 

Contact the researcher

Professor Clarence Ng
clarence.ng@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Clarence Ng’s research