Abstract

When students face more challenging problems, their beliefs undergo changes. The purpose of this research is to investigate the beliefs of sixth grade elementary students about solving mathematics problems based on metaphors, which was done using a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population is the sixth grade female students of Shahrekord District 2, 30 of whom were selected based on random-cluster sampling. The research tool was a questionnaire containing two problems and at the end of each problem, there was a question related to the students' point of view. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. First, students' metaphors about problem 1 were categorized into 7 categories and about problem 2 into 4 categories, which indicated positive, neutral or negative beliefs. Among these categories were "lawful", "beneficial" and "annoying" and it shows that some consider solving mathematical problems as requiring laws and algorithms and some believed that these problems are useful in life and some described them as painful and annoying. The results showed that 56.7 percent have positive or neutral beliefs about problem 1 and 43.3 percent about problem 2. Also, 52.2 percent of the students who gave correct responses in problem 1 and 33.3 percent of students who gave correct responses in problem 2 presented positive metaphors and 85.7 percent of the students who answered problem 1 and 21.1 percent of the students who gave an incorrect response for problem 2 or left it nonresponse mentioned negative metaphors.