Artistically talented students’ perceptions of mathematics: View, interest, competence, and relevance

Abstract

Mathematics learning in Art Vocational Schools (AVSs), the one that should be tailored to the career-related needs of young adult learners of their era, would inevitably necessitate continuous improvement. Such improvement of mathematics learning quality would be possible when considering the perceptions of Artistically Talented Students (ATSs). This research aimed to describe these students’ perceptions of mathematics in four aspects, namely view, interest, competence, and mathematics relevance to art after they attend compulsory mathematics learning for two years. This was phenomenology research involving 30 students from four different majors - painting, visual communication design, ceramic craft, and wood craft - at an AVS located in Bantul Regency, Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The data were mainly collected through in-depth interviews and then triangulated with classroom observations. Content analysis methods were implemented to produce themes and their relationship, whilst to ensure reliability, two independent coders conducted the process of coding. Later, the researchers conducted a thematic analysis and drew some conclusions. The results generally showed that, first, ATSs were interested in learning mathematics though most of them labelled mathematics as mechanistic and unattractive. Second, in terms of competence, this study revealed that over half would opine that they lacked mathematics competence. Third, all of them viewed that essentially mathematics could be used in artworks. However, just under half of them considered that mathematics learning contents were relevant to their major. These findings, hence, implied that further research needs to formulate instructional contents that meet the demands of the relevant artistic jobs and students’ daily lifes.

Keywords

• Art vocational school
• Artistically talented student
• Mathematics learning
• Perception of mathematics

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