Impacting positively on students’ mathematical problem solving beliefs: An instructional intervention of short duration

• Many students have certain counterproductive beliefs about mathematical problem solving.
• Previous interventions that achieved a positive impact on some of these beliefs tended to have long duration.
• We designed a 75 min intervention that successfully addressed four common and counterproductive student beliefs.
• We discuss the theoretical underpinning of the intervention and its implementation with undergraduate students.

Many students of all levels of education have certain beliefs about mathematical problem solving that tend to influence negatively these students’ ability or willingness to engage productively with problem solving. Previous interventions that achieved a positive impact on such student beliefs tended to last over extended periods of time, thereby producing research knowledge that is not easily amenable to “scaling up.” In this paper, we take a first step toward addressing the challenging but important question of whether a positive impact on four specific student problem solving beliefs, which are common and counterproductive, can be achieved with an intervention of short duration. We focus on the implementation of a 75-min intervention in the last research cycle of a 4-year, university-based design experiment to exemplify our theoretical framework and to discuss the promise of the intervention to support the intended outcomes. Directions for future research are discussed in light of these findings.