Internationally, associations between mathematics achievement and students’ beliefs and attitudes related to learning are well established. This article examines five studies to identify patterns in New Zealand students’ mathematics-related beliefs and attitudes, and their relationships with achievement. The studies involved students aged 5-13 years and looked at different aspects of students’ beliefs and attitudes, from ideas about the malleability of intelligence, to confidence in their general mathematics ability, to task-specific mathematics self-efficacy judgments. This article argues that using task-specific measures of students’ mathematics self-efficacy is of particular value for revealing a relationship between achievement and self-belief, and that teacher-implemented micro-interventions can be effective in strengthening both achievement and self-belief.
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