Abstract:

Many students experience difficulties and failures in mathematics already in elementary school. Often, this has a negative impact on their self-efficacy as mathematics learners, and as a result, their motivation to study the discipline decreases. These students might reach middle high school with low confidence about their ability to study mathematics and may well refrain from studying it.

In order to provide these students with a corrective emotional experience, teachers need to implement uncommon approach to the teaching of mathematics, along with the need to close the gap students have accumulated in acquiring basic skills. However, repeating familiar contents that have already been learnt in elementary school, with little success, and implementing the same approaches is ineffective. Moreover, students may feel insulted by the fact that they have to learn repetitively elementary contents. In an attempt to address this need but differently, a learning environment based on ancient Indian mathematics, the Vedic Mathematics, was developed.

The Vedic mathematics is dated to 2600-3000 BC, and presents simple and unconventional calculation techniques and methods for solving problems in different areas of mathematics. The beauty of the Vedic methods stems from its coherence and simplicity. The Vedic techniques are easy to understand and students enjoy practicing them. Furtheremore, students are unacquainted with the Vedic methods, and therefore may not feel a sense of repetition of something familiar. For this reason, we assumed that students who experienced an ongoing series of failures may get pleasure and success from engagement with the Vedic methods, and in return their sense of self-efficacy and motivation to learn mathematics will strengthen.

In a pilot study, 137 students from 7 schools (73 eighth graders from 4 schools and 64 ninth graders from 3 schools) were engaged in a learning environment consisted of a series of 15 lessons, divided into independent clusters of 2-3 lessons, dealing with various arithmetic operations using Vedic methods. All students studied mathematics at the lowest level available in their school, and were defined as 'students with learning difficulties'. Using a questionnaire of attitudes toward mathematics, a questionnaire of self-efficacy and feedback questionnaires at the end of each cluster, the study examined the impact of students' involvement in the learning environment on their sense of self-efficacy as learners of mathematics.

The results indicate that the experience of Vedic methods did provide students with a sense of pleasure and success, their self-efficacy increased, their attitudes towards mathematics improved and many of them argued that following the experience they came to the realization that they could succeed in mathematics if they were to invest the necessary effort. Nonetheless, it should be noted that since the study describes a relatively short experience, presently long-term effects of this experience cannot be identified. Currently, we are conducting a follow-up study, examining the long-term effects of the increase in students' sense of self-efficacy.

Keywords:

Vedic mathematics, low achievement students, self-efficacy.