Around the world the prevalence of mathematics anxiety and disengagement point to a poor sense of student 'mathematical wellbeing'. Mathematical wellbeing is defined here as the fulfilment of one's ultimate or core values, accompanied by positive feelings and functioning in mathematics education. Yet student wellbeing and how to support it in specific school subjects including mathematics is vastly under-researched. Also, despite outperforming other countries in international mathematics assessments, East Asian students generally appear to experience poor affect and high academic burden in mathematics education, which are indicative of poor mathematical wellbeing. In this context, this explorative and descriptive study investigates the values that are associated with the mathematical wellbeing of a cohort of Chinese primary school students. 258 Grade three students in Chengdu, China responded to a questionnaire which explored teacher-nominated mathematics learning moments that students valued most for their mathematical wellbeing. Findings pointed to students valuing all the learning moments to some extent, with good grades, fun and interest, mathematics-themed videos, and teacher praise rated most commonly for wellbeing. The values underlying these learning moments are similar to the seven mathematical wellbeing dimensions found in Australian classrooms. The findings also highlight the cultural subjectivities involved, in which the same classroom actions can reflect different underlying values across cultures, and in which a particular value can be espoused in different ways in different places. We also look ahead to suggest how teachers might support students' mathematical wellbeing, by recognising and then fulfilling their students' values in the mathematics classroom. Copyright © 2022 Springer.

One hundred and eighty ethnic minority students studying in Hong Kong mainstream schools were found to value knowledge, activities, practice, product, inquiry, process, feedback, and technology in their mathematics learning. To identify these values, a mixed methods approach was adopted, using a values questionnaire as a lens to identify what students find important in mathematics learning, and followed by semi-structured focus group interviews for details and verification. The data also revealed that ethnic minority students valued activities and practice more than their ethnic Chinese peers. Implications for research and instructional practice are offered. Copyright © 2022 Routledge.

Values, as a culturally specific notion, have a vital role to play in classroom mathematics learning. In this chapter, we argue that valuing, especially from the student's perspective, serves as a lens for us to better understand how they perform in mathematics learning. To develop such a lens, we investigated the componential structure of Hong Kong mathematics students by utilising a values questionnaire as a lens to better understand what the students find important in mathematics learning. A principal component analysis has been used in this study with the objective to interrogate the data. The analysis of the data led to the identification of nine components valued by Hong Kong students in their mathematics learning. We discuss the findings in terms of the Hong Kong culture and context and the value categories and we suggest implications for future research studies. Copyright © 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The success of East Asian school education in general, and in mathematics education in particular, has been an ongoing subject of research over the last few decades in the “West”, suggesting that no conclusive factor(s) underlying performance appears to have been identified yet. The phenomenon of the “paradox of the Chinese learner” remains, while OECD data indicates an absence of correlation between affective factors and performance. This paper reports on a research study that has been designed to explore the possible involvement — and significance — in student learning of the conative domain, since most if not all prior studies had focused only on the cognitive and affective domains. To this end, a validated questionnaire was administered to 1,505 students from primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong. The “What I Find Important (in My Mathematics Learning)” questionnaire collects data regarding student valuing in three ways: a 5-point Likert scale (64 items), semantic differential items (10 items), and an open-ended, scenario-stimulated response section (4 items). Principal component analysis and content analysis of collected questionnaire data suggest that Hong Kong students highly valued 11 attributes, namely word-problem skills, activities, practice, exploration, ICT, connections, process, feedback, explanation, control, and certainty. These values are interpreted from a sociocultural lens, with some of these associated with Confucian Heritage Culture values, but at the same time having interacted with cognitive and affective factors potentially to optimize student performance. Copyright © 2018 HKERA International Conference.

This chapter introduces the reader to the What I Find Important (in my mathematics learning) study (WIFI), conducted by a consortium of 21 research teams from 18 economies. It uses the same questionnaire to assess what students value in their respective mathematics education experiences. Two case economies, Hong Kong and Japan, provide the context for the discussion. This provides a reference point for analyzing four significant themes: the affordance to identify and define cultures and subcultures, the documenting and comparing of espoused and enacted valuing, the triangulation of survey responses, and the culturally situated labelling of values and valuing. Copyright © 2017 Springer International Publishing AG.

It has become increasingly recognized that what teachers and students value affect teaching and learning in general and in the area of mathematics in particular. Yet, the extent to which this is so varies across cultural regions. In recent years, how the ethnic Chinese teach and learn mathematics has attracted much attention worldwide. It is precisely the purpose of the present study to investigate the value structures of three Chinese regions. Using a recently developed and validated questionnaire, students’ values in mathematics learning in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan are delineated. In the first place, the results reveal that there are six dimensions in the students’ value structure, namely achievement, relevance, practice, communication, information and communications technology as well as feedback. However, in each of the six value components derived from the principal components analysis, statistically significant differences between the regions were found. Copyright © 2015 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.