Abstracts - Earli

communities in science) of early introduction of their own particular substitutes of mathematicallogic (analogy, manipulations of symbols and/or almost-magical invocations) during the educationphase (undergraduate studies) in an apparent attempt to avoid the conflicts emerging in theenculturation process.Enculturation in mathematics: Shifts in students’ view and attitudeJacob Perrenet, Eindhoven University of Technology, NetherlandsRuurd Taconis, Eindhoven School of Education, NetherlandsThe main aims of this study are to investigate the change in mathematical attitude of mathematicsstudents during their study years and their explanations of these changes. The mathematicalattitude is measured when they start their Bachelor and again when they nearly complete it. Thestudents are asked to explain their personal shifts in attitude. The mean shifts over fourconsecutive generations are analyzed over the group as a whole and compared with the attitude oftheir University teachers. The change in student attitude appears to be in the direction of theprofessional attitude: they tend to perform more metacognitive actions, they have become more ofthe opinion that problems can be solved in various ways, they tend to read more precisely througha problem’s givens beforehand, and they tend to formulate more precisely. The students explainthese shifts mainly by the specific nature of the University math problems compared with schoolproblems. In school answers had to be precise numbers. At University precise answer is notalways possible, and the method of solution is more important. Also, the students have discoveredthat at the University hard work is necessary to acquire insight and that mathematics is not acompleted body of knowledge. The changes in attitude can be seen as enculturation into themathematics subculture. In The Netherlands the interest in studying mathematics has decreaseddramatically. The enculturation hypothesis poses that education does not succeed in bridging thegap between the culture of mathematics and the culture of secondary school students. This studyshows that secondary education has shown an impoverished image of the real mathematicalculture. It is advised to present a more authentic image of professional mathematics in secondaryeducation.Does science suit me? How perceived cultural prototypes influence students’ commitment to aschool subjectRuurd Taconis, Eindhoven School of Education, NetherlandsUrsula Kessels, Freie Universität Berlin, GermanyIn many industrialized countries, science, and especially physics, is very unpopular with students,resulting in shortage of graduates in science and engineering. In our study, we examine the impactof prototypes of science (i.e. the image of the typical person liking science or the typical scienceteacher) on students’ liking for these subjects, and taking these subjects in upper secondaryeducation. Self-to prototype matching theory (Niedenthal, Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1985) proposesthat when taking a decision, people compare their self-image with a prototype choosing each of theoptions in question and eventually choose the option with the biggest similarity between self andprototype. Such, as the science prototypes possess several negative aspects and are very differentfrom the image that students have of themselves, students tend not to enter this field (Hannover &Kessels, 2004). Our study includes data from more than 300 high-school student from TheNetherlands and Germany. They completed questionnaires in which to describe both subjectrelated prototypes (students liking the subject, teachers teaching the subject) and their image ofthemselves. We could show that in both countries, science related prototypes comprise negativeaspects and that students feel most different from the science prototypes (compared to other– 163 –