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Mathematics games are widely employed in school classrooms for such reasons as a reward for early finishers or to enhance students' attitude towards mathematics. During a four week period, a total of 222 Grade 5 and 6 (9 to 12 years old) children from Melbourne, Australia, were taught multiplication and division of decimal numbers using calculator games or rich mathematical activities. Likert scale surveys of the children's attitudes towards games as a vehicle for learning mathematics revealed unexpectedly high proportions of negative attitudes at the conclusion of the research. In contrast, student interview data revealed positive associations between games and mathematical learning. This paper reports on the methodological dilemma of resultant conflicting attitudinal data related to game-playing. Concerns arising from the divergence in the results are raised in this paper. Implications based on the experience of this study may inform educational researchers about future methodological choices involving attitudinal research.Mathematical games are popular with teachers as alternatives to more traditional forms of repetitive practice, for many parts of the mathematics curriculum, and especially for arithmetical computation. The research literature, as well as popular commercial publishing, supports the idea that games can fire children's interest and motivation because students enjoy competition, challenge, and fun (Bragg, 2003;Bright, Harvey, & Wheeler, 1985;Ernest, 1986;Gough, 1999;Owens, 2005).This research began by assuming that a novel pedagogical approach, such as game-playing, might have a positive effect on students' classroom engagement and attitudes towards mathematics. What is reported here is based on a larger study which explored games as a pedagogical approach to enhance mathematical learning (see . Games were examined in that larger study for their potential to promote mathematical learning, but that aspect is not reported in this paper. Surprisingly, triangulation of the data revealed conflicting attitudinal responses from the students about games. These attitudinal data were collected via Likert scales and student interviews. This paper focuses on the methodological difficulty of interpreting conflicting results and raises some possible explanations as to the contradictory nature of these data. Background and Theoretical FrameworkAttitudes

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