Farhat Syyeda | University of Leicester (original) (raw)

Papers by Farhat Syyeda

This thesis explores the learning journeys of 21 adult learners as they return to formal educatio... more This thesis explores the learning journeys of 21 adult learners as they return to formal education and re-engage with Mathematics in an adult education college in England. The participants of this research, most of them women, were studying on adult Mathematics courses and two third of them belonged to the BAME (Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic) group. The aim of this research was to understand how learners construct and narrate their mathematical identities (MI), and how these identities evolve and develop over time. It further investigated the different factors that influenced the formation of learners' MIs at different stages of their lives.This study was undertaken from an interpretive and sociocultural perspective and employed identity as a conceptual and analytical lens to examine learners' relationship with Mathematics. To develop the conceptual framework for this research, I drew from the theory of social learning (Wenger, 1998), the concept of identity as recognition...

This article presents my experience of using pictures/images drawn by children as a form of data ... more This article presents my experience of using pictures/images drawn by children as a form of data in research and discusses the merits and implications of employing this method. It comes from research of a mixed method exploratory case study to investigate the attitudes of 11 and 15 year old secondary school students (in the East Midlands) towards Mathematics. The aim of this research was to gain an insight into the emotions, cognition, beliefs and behaviour of learners regarding Maths and the factors which influence their attitude. Besides using the tried and tested data collection tools such as focus groups and questionnaires, the children were asked to draw pictures illustrating their vision of Maths and its impact on their lives. The idea was to offer them an alternative medium of communication to exhibit their feelings and thoughts. Students used emoticons, numerals, figures, characters and mathematical symbols to show their favourable/unfavourable attitudes towards Maths and th...

This paper reports on a multi-modal exploratory case study within the realm of pragmatism to stud... more This paper reports on a multi-modal exploratory case study within the realm of pragmatism to study the attitudes of 11 and 15-year-old students towards Mathematics (ATM). More than 200 secondary school children from the East Midlands, England, participated in this research. The aim of this research was to understand students' emotions, perceptions, beliefs and vision about Mathematics and to investigate the factors which influence their attitudes. This study employed a multi-modal research design to elicit data from the young learners by engaging and involving them through different media of communication. Four different kinds of data were collected namely aural or spoken data (audio recorded in focus group interviews), scale data (from Likert scale style items in the questionnaire), textual/written data (collected through open ended questions in the questionnaire), and visual data (in the form of pictures drawn by the participants). Since the favoured mode of expression varies from person to person, multiple modes of data collection can include a larger number of respondents by providing them the opportunity to orchestrate their perspective in their preferred mode of communication. This research suggests that gender and attainment level have a significant impact on attitudes towards Mathematics. Boys and high ability learners have a more positive attitude towards the subject as compared to girls and low ability students. Age, socio economic status and linguistic background also seem to influence ATM but the effect is statistically insignificant.