Possible causes of avoidance behaviours
This resource lists possible causes of avoidance behaviour in mathematics and ways to address it.
About this resource
Students who are underachieving in mathematics often exhibit behaviours that range from attempting to disappear off the teacher’s radar to creating major distractions from the task at hand. These behaviours include:
- silence or non-participation
- piggybacking or reflecting back others’ answers to questions
- random guessing when asked to volunteer a response
- distracting other people within the group.
Most of these students show low levels of confidence when participating in discussion, asking questions, or sharing ideas. They may have worked in classes where sharing ideas was not a priority or where strong students dominated the talk, or they may be anxious about being wrong.
This resource helps teachers identify some reasons for behaviours that inhibit participation and provides some strategies to engage these learners and increase their achievement in mathematics.
Possible causes of avoidance behaviours
All students are individuals, so you need to try and get to the bottom of the issue (the cause of this behaviour) for each student before deciding on a strategy. Be aware that “boredom” can be a cover-all excuse for opting out or acting up. Boredom is not a cause as much as an outcome.
Some possible causes:
- Language skills: for some reason, the student can’t read well enough to extract meaning from maths texts or can’t understand teacher explanations or questions.
- Mathematical identity: the student’s experiences with maths (or lack of experience with it) cumulatively result in low or no confidence in their ability to make sense of it (Effective Pedagogy in Mathematics/Pangarau BES, pages 54–55, 58–60).
- Personal safety: the student doesn’t feel safe taking the risks needed for learning. They may not feel safe culturally, the class may lack structure, or socio-mathematical norms may not be well established (Mathematics BES, pages 54–60).
- Insufficient challenge: the student may not be challenged enough because the teacher believes they can’t achieve and so gives them low-level tasks (Mathematics BES, page 60).
- Lack of connection to the student's life or needs: They can’t see the relevance or point of the mathematical content because the teaching style is not connecting with them. (See the Effective Teaching Profile in Te Kotahitanga.)
Encouraging and modelling mathematical “discourse” has a positive impact on learning. Students learn how to participate and contribute to the mathematical talk, and this builds their confidence. The effective teacher not only facilitates but also participates in the discussion and comments critically on the quality of the talk. In this way, the teacher guides students to learn how to explain and justify their mathematical reasoning and explore and challenge others’ thinking (Hunter and Anthony, 2010).
Teachers have noted that when they succeed in boosting students’ confidence and participation in ALiM groups, students also participate increasingly in whole-class discussions in all curriculum areas.
Back to Resource 11: Addressing avoidance behaviours in mathematics classes.
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