Rejection of mathematics

Rejection of mathematics: a reality or myth in an elementary and secondary school in Fortaleza, was motivated by the interest in confirming or refuting this phenomenon from the students’ perspective. The first part of the research was conducted through a bibliographic survey and, in a second stage, a field activity. Two questionnaires containing open and closed questions were used as data collection instruments and administered to seventh and ninth grade students. The bibliographic research led us to see rejection of mathematics as a reality experienced by education professionals and revealed several factors responsible for its construction, since it is assumed that students develop attraction or repulsion through their relationship with the world around them. We concluded that the data collected by the field research contradicted the statistics, as 93.26% of students said they liked mathematics. The contradictions found create, through these results, space to question the effectiveness of the questionnaire as the sole instrument for data collection in scientific research.