Reflecting on my Inquiry Project
During this course, I feel like I only started to delve into a very wide field within mathematics education. A lot of things came up, from my starting point "Why do kids dislike math class so strongly? Why do adults dislike the idea of even having to do math?" I was genuinely curious about what was driving this social force against math. It led me to read into motivation, fixed mindsets, growth mindsets, myths of math people and genetics, gender, indicators of success, assessment, reputation, social conformity. So many things affect what a child thinks about math class. But not all of these things were equal. Plenty of writing has been written on mindsets and motivation. Society is shifting toward adopting a better attitude about math class. But then, math class wasn't shifting to adopt a better attitude about students. And this was something that I started to run with during my inquiry. I was certainly interested in issues of gender and representation in classroo...
