If You Had To Tell an Alien What Math Is...: Construct of Mathematics and SQUARE ONE TV.

The ideas of the nature, purpose, and scope of mathematics held by students is an issue of interest to the mathematics education community. Movement from a mathematics as discrete operations perspective to a mathematics as problem-solving perspective is a desired change in mathematics education reform. A pretest/posttest experimental design study examined the effects of SQUARE ONE TV, a television series about mathematics aimed at 8- to 12-year-old children, on the problem-solving behavior and attitudes toward mathematics of 240 fifth graders from 4 public schools in Corpus Christi, Texas. Attitude data was collected from a subgroup of 24 students exposed to 30 SQUARE ONE TV programs and from 24 students in a control group having no SQUARE ONE TV contact. Presented in this paper are the children's constructs of mathematics and change effected by viewing SQUARE ONE TV programming, as evaluated through an Attitude Interview and an Essay. Among the results are: (1) viewers made significantly greater gains than nonviewers in the proportion of statements mentioning more complex problem solving made in the Attitude Interview; (2) viewers produced a significantly greater proportion of advanced mathematics statements than the nonviewers in the posttest; and (3) no significant main effects of sex, ethnicity or socioeconomic status (SES) occurred in any results. Findings indicated that SQUARE ONE TV had an impact on children's discrete operations constructs of mathematics. The interview questions are attached. (MDH)