A Study Of Undergraduate Mathmatics Conception By Implicit Method

The mathematics conception of students consists of three components : the understanding of the nature of mathematics knowledge, the understanding of the nature of knowing mathematics and the self-conception of mathematics. It is necessary to connect implicit social cognition with the research of the mathematics conception to know implicit mathematics cognition when implicit social cognition is popular. Considering the possibility of the connection of mathematics conception and implicit social cognition, the present thesis studies the mathematics conception of undergraduates from three aspects: attitude, identity and stereotype. In other words, the present study investigates the implicit math attitude, implicit math Identity and implicit math-gender stereotypes. The "Implicit Association Test(IAT)" and "Stereotypic Explanatory Bias(SEB)" are used to study the implicit mathematics conception of undergraduate in this thesis.There are two studies. Each study has two experiments. There are 4 experiments totally. In Study 1, we investigate the IAT effect of the implicit math attitude and the implicit math identity by IAT and checks their gender difference and major difference. In Study 2, We investigate whether there are implicit math-gender stereotypes that "male does better than female in math " , and give analysis to the results.Results of the two studies have showed the following conclusions:1 Significant difference exists between the IAT score of the implicit math attitude and 0. We find a negative implicit math attitude, and gender difference and major difference is not found.2 Significant difference exists between the IAT score of implicit mathematics identity and 0. We also find a negative implicit math identity, and gender difference and major difference is not found.3 The implicit math- gender stereotypes that "male does better than female in math" are apparently found in undergraduates by the IAT and SEB. Gender difference is found by IAT, but no gender difference is found by SEB. The two measures have possibly measured different aspects of the complex neural network connection of the subject memory. No major difference is found in both of the experiments.