Interest and motivation towards Mathematics: Most talented students’ self-perception

Abstract

Since the beginning of schooling, students have been using elementary procedures to find solutions to problems that indicate how they structure their mathematical thought. One of Mathematics learning objectives is to get students to develop a flexible, agile and applicable knowledge that can be continually reinvented and adapted to new situations. Regrettably, this objective is not easy to reach and students frequently complain about the failures of mathematical education, mainly for the rejection sometimes inspired by this discipline, causing a negative attitude towards their own learning.

In this article, we will focus on the attitudes that students show towards Mathematics. For this analysis, we will use the results obtained through the process of construction of the “Batería de Evaluación de la Competencia Matemática” (BECOMA), an evaluation instrument that measures the mathematical competence of students in 5^th grade of Primary Education, focusing on the variable Interest and motivation towards the subject of Mathematics from the student’s point of view analyzed throughout the process of validation of the set of evaluation tools previously mentioned. In the last section of this article, we will only focus on the results of the most talented students in Mathematics.