Results from the Maths Attitude Survey

We got all 120 of the Year 4 students to complete the Maths Attitude Survey last week. (My dream is to get the whole of the school to do it, but we crawl before we walk...)

I thought it would be interesting to look at their results so I got them to complete the survey as a Google Form. 113 out of the 120 completed it.

Here are the results:

So we had more girls complete the survey than boys.

Interesting - we still some very positive words being chosen to describe maths. "Fun" was right up there but the No. #1 word of choice was "Challenging". We had a talk about that. The kids thought that this was a word that described maths as being something worthy of effort and rewarding when they succeeded with a puzzle or problem.

"Scary" was rated very low (good!) but 22 students (19.5%) still chose "boring". This may have been a result of having all 120 kids complete the digital survey together - there may have been some contamination of data. Or maybe this is really what they think.

What would you choose to do all day? Art or reading or drama. Maybe this says something about our creative clientele. Maths comes in at #7. (UOI is Unit of Inquiry - we are a PYP school. Surprised this ranked so low.)

And so, on to some questions about explicit maths:

 - Not too bad at multiplication...

...Very confident with 2-digit addition...

...Subtraction not too bad...

 ...Division is a bit less certain...

... Fractions is equally uncertain...

 ... Converting fraction to percentages - not good...

... Measurement - surprisingly not confident. I thought this would be scored higher. Lots of "mostly".

Then we got to Question 10. Rate yourself on the scale (1-10) to show where you would be:

On the original survey, students had to draw a cross on the line to show where they thought they would be. On the digital version, I was limited by the fact that I could only give them a maximum of 10 boxes to choose from.

But the results were even more revealing. Here is the data from all of Year 4:

In terms of numbers, almost 60% of our boys rate themselves 8 or above.

In contrast, less than 16% of girls rate themselves 8 or above. 

And then, 42% of girls rate themselves 5 or less whereas about 14% of boys rates themselves 5 or less. 

This is huge. These kids are only 9 years old, turning 10. How do they get these ideas about themselves? 

Much work to be done on mindset.