Five small-group interviews were conducted with three students per group
in an office on the school grounds. The aim of the interviews was to gain a more
comprehensive understanding of how participants viewed their mathematical confidence
and to determine the experiences and contexts they believe impacted its development.
Group interviews took place about a month after the survey and mathematics test were
conducted. Each interview lasted approximately 20 minutes and included a range of
questions as well as written tasks to guide and prompt dialogue. To stimulate responses,
participants were presented with a bank of words (e.g., confident, poor, smart, average,
etc.) and asked to select a word that best described how confident they felt in mathematics
“most of the time”. They were also asked to respond to three self-belief statements, similar
to those in the MES, using the same five-point Likert scale