title: Fiji and New Zealand Pasifika students' perceptions of mathematics and their attitudes towards mathematics learning

authors: Balenaivalu, Siliva

subjects: Pasifika students' perceptions

abstract: Abstract

This thesis explores the perceptions and attitudes towards mathematics learning of 36 students from Fiji and 12 Pasifika students living in New Zealand. The students were in Years 7 and 8, included a range of abilities in maths as assessed by their teachers. The New Zealand (NZ) students attended a school that had participated in the Numeracy Development Project (NDP) several years prior to the study. Data was collected using semi-structured and clinical interviews. Seven key questions were the main focus of this study. The students were asked about their views on: working collectively or individually, the importance of knowing and sharing solution strategies with others, the nature of mathematics, people who supported their maths learning, their attitudes towards mathematics, and how good they thought they were at maths. They solved problems involving subtraction, division and proportional problems. 

The findings revealed that nearly all of the Fiji students but just over half of the NZ students supported group work. On their views about the value of knowing others' strategies, nearly seven tenths of the Fiji students and just under a half of the NZ students thought that it was important. However, all the children were unanimous in their view that explaining their solution strategies to others was important. The findings also revealed that nearly all the students from both countries thought that mathematics was about numbers and operations. Most of the Fiji children commented that it was also about problem solving, whereas the NZ students mentioned having alternative strategies as what they thought mathematics all about.  

The students' views about a teacher's role in helping them learn mathematics greatly differed between the two countries. Slightly more than half of the Fiji students thought that the teacher's role was to show them strategies. The Fiji students also described their teachers as someone who gave them notes to copy and provided exercises from the textbook. In contrast the NZ students mentioned their teacher as someone who helped their mathematics learning by sharing clues, giving tasks that challenged them and grouped them by ability before helping them. The responses of all the students revealed that there was great support from friends, parents and relatives towards their mathematics learning. The students also rated their feelings towards mathematics on a three-point rating scale with happy, neutral and sad faces. Half of the students from both countries chose the happy face with the other half choosing the neutral face. None of them chose the sad face as matching how they felt about maths most of the time.

The students also assessed themselves on how good they were at maths. The majority of the students from both countries rated themselves as  good  and none of them chose the box showing  very poor . The students were asked to do some tasks on subtraction, division and proportional problems. There was a major contrast between the two countries on how they worked out their answers. The Fiji students' responses showed their fluency with standard written algorithms and a high level of procedural knowledge. The NZ students on the other hand hardly used algorithms. Instead their responses showed the use of mental strategies for solving tasks ranging from stage 2, (counting from one on materials) to stage 7, (advanced multiplicative part-whole) on the NDP Number Framework.

text: Fiji and New Zealand Pasifika students' perceptions of mathematics and their attitudes towards mathematics learning Abstract

This thesis explores the perceptions and attitudes towards mathematics learning of 36 students from Fiji and 12 Pasifika students living in New Zealand. The students were in Years 7 and 8, included a range of abilities in maths as assessed by their teachers. The New Zealand (NZ) students attended a school that had participated in the Numeracy Development Project (NDP) several years prior to the study. Data was collected using semi-structured and clinical interviews. Seven key questions were the main focus of this study. The students were asked about their views on: working collectively or individually, the importance of knowing and sharing solution strategies with others, the nature of mathematics, people who supported their maths learning, their attitudes towards mathematics, and how good they thought they were at maths. They solved problems involving subtraction, division and proportional problems. 

The findings revealed that nearly all of the Fiji students but just over half of the NZ students supported group work. On their views about the value of knowing others' strategies, nearly seven tenths of the Fiji students and just under a half of the NZ students thought that it was important. However, all the children were unanimous in their view that explaining their solution strategies to others was important. The findings also revealed that nearly all the students from both countries thought that mathematics was about numbers and operations. Most of the Fiji children commented that it was also about problem solving, whereas the NZ students mentioned having alternative strategies as what they thought mathematics all about.  

The students' views about a teacher's role in helping them learn mathematics greatly differed between the two countries. Slightly more than half of the Fiji students thought that the teacher's role was to show them strategies. The Fiji students also described their teachers as someone who gave them notes to copy and provided exercises from the textbook. In contrast the NZ students mentioned their teacher as someone who helped their mathematics learning by sharing clues, giving tasks that challenged them and grouped them by ability before helping them. The responses of all the students revealed that there was great support from friends, parents and relatives towards their mathematics learning. The students also rated their feelings towards mathematics on a three-point rating scale with happy, neutral and sad faces. Half of the students from both countries chose the happy face with the other half choosing the neutral face. None of them chose the sad face as matching how they felt about maths most of the time.

The students also assessed themselves on how good they were at maths. The majority of the students from both countries rated themselves as  good  and none of them chose the box showing  very poor . The students were asked to do some tasks on subtraction, division and proportional problems. There was a major contrast between the two countries on how they worked out their answers. The Fiji students' responses showed their fluency with standard written algorithms and a high level of procedural knowledge. The NZ students on the other hand hardly used algorithms. Instead their responses showed the use of mental strategies for solving tasks ranging from stage 2, (counting from one on materials) to stage 7, (advanced multiplicative part-whole) on the NDP Number Framework.

year: 2008

title: “All you can eat” ontology-building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc

authors: Sarjant, Samuel

subjects: ontologies

abstract: In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology building,
but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-running Cyc project is able to assist here. We describe methods used to add 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia to collections in ResearchCyc entirely automatically. Evaluation with 22 human subjects shows high precision both for the new concepts’ categorization, and their assignment as individuals or collections. Most importantly we show how Cyc itself can be leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ it assertions one by one, enabling it to reject those that contradict its other knowledge.

text: “All you can eat” ontology-building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology building,
but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-running Cyc project is able to assist here. We describe methods used to add 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia to collections in ResearchCyc entirely automatically. Evaluation with 22 human subjects shows high precision both for the new concepts’ categorization, and their assignment as individuals or collections. Most importantly we show how Cyc itself can be leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ it assertions one by one, enabling it to reject those that contradict its other knowledge.

year: 2009

title: Imagining our own approaches

authors: Smith, Linda Tuhiwai

abstract: I spent some formative years of my life either in the back of museums or their basements helping my father, a scholar of Māori Studies, and keeping myself out of trouble. In the late 1960s I had one small job in the library basement of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, typing new labels for the captains’ log books of ships that were sailing during the American Revolution. I read most of those journals that consisted of pages and pages of wind directions with the rare glimpse of an encounter with another ship or a list of supplies. Why were we there in Salem when we came from Aotearoa, New Zealand? We were there because Salem was the home base for ships that sailed into the Pacific and returned home with collections of materials from the various Pacific Islands countries they visited. My father was studying elaborately carved items from the Marquesa Islands that looked very much like Māori designs.

text: Imagining our own approaches I spent some formative years of my life either in the back of museums or their basements helping my father, a scholar of Māori Studies, and keeping myself out of trouble. In the late 1960s I had one small job in the library basement of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, typing new labels for the captains’ log books of ships that were sailing during the American Revolution. I read most of those journals that consisted of pages and pages of wind directions with the rare glimpse of an encounter with another ship or a list of supplies. Why were we there in Salem when we came from Aotearoa, New Zealand? We were there because Salem was the home base for ships that sailed into the Pacific and returned home with collections of materials from the various Pacific Islands countries they visited. My father was studying elaborately carved items from the Marquesa Islands that looked very much like Māori designs.

year: 2015