Attitudes in Mathematics Education

Attitudes towards mathematics has a long history in mathematics education research. Over the time, research on attitudes and, more in general, on affective aspects developed a wide range of methodologies and perspectives in mathematics education, playing a growing role in the field. In this chapter, I will describe the development of the research about attitude in mathematics education, discussing the main issues emerged in this field. In particular, I will discuss the definition problem, that is the emergence of the need for a clear definition of the construct, and the ground for the development of our (TMA) three-dimensional model of attitude (Di Martino and Zan, 2010). In the last part of the chapter, some fields of application of the TMA model will also be discussed.