“Maths and me”: software analysis of narrative data about attitude towards math

Some years ago we undertook a research study aimed to obtain a ‘grounded’ characterization of attitude toward maths through the use of a narrative tool: we assigned to a large sample of Italian students the essay “Maths and me”, collecting more than 1600 texts. The material gathered is very rich and this richness has suggested the use of multiple approaches for its analysis. In this contribution we present some preliminary results, obtained using a piece of software for text analysis, regarding the way students of different grades describe their relationship with mathematics. In particular, we discuss the results from a comparative analysis between students of different school levels in order to find analogies and differences in the description of their own relationship with maths