Abstract. Purpose of the study: The purpose of the study is to develop an instrument in both Kazakh and Russian languages that measures students’ attitudes towards mathematics through translating a widely used 51-item instrument developed by Mulhern and Rae. Methodology: This work utilized factor analysis in SPSS using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with VARIMAX. To this end, the attitude test of Mulher and Rae consisting of 51 5-point Likert scale items in English were translated into Kazakh and Russian languages. The translated instrument is conducted amoing 378 university students in Kazakhstan. To test the internal consistency, the Cronbach alpha methodology was implemented. Main Findings: The results revealed five underlying dimensions of the instrument with 37 items in both languages. These five scales are Success, Male Domain, Parent’s Attitudes, Mathematics-Related Affect, and Usefulness scales. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Barlett’s test of sphericity threshold is reported to be 0.875 with chi-square 7106, degree of freedom 1275 and p-value less than 0.0001. The analysis show a very high overall Cronbach reliability coefficient of .91. Applications of this study: This study can be used in any mathematics learning descilpine in higher education institutions where medium of instruction is either Kazakh or Russian to test whether students attitudes towards mathematics is improving or not. Besides, the instrument can be used to study correlation between attitudes towards mathematics and learning outcome in the field. Novelty/Originality of this study: This is probably the first ever work done in Kazakh and Russian to develop a comprehensive instrument that measures students’ attitudes towards mathematics.

This study examines variables explaining student’s academic performances in mathematics from specialized engineering institutions. A survey consisting of 42 items was conducted from 127 students and statistical multiple regression was carried out to analyze the data set. Based on Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Attitude Scales followed by the result of stepwise linear regression, found a significant impact of high school geometry grades in mathematics performance. Au-thors suggest that mathematics instructors in higher education should pay attention to improve their student’s confidence, which in turn would decrease the anxiety level towards mathematics. The high school teachers should not advise their students to go to technical sciences in higher education unless the student’s confidence and high school math grade are sufficiently high

No abstract

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2), the cause of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), within months of emergence from Wuhan, China, has rapidly spread, exacting a devastating human toll across around the world reaching the pandemic stage at the the beginning of March 2020. Thus, COVID-19s daily increasing cases and deaths have led to worldwide lockdown, quarantine and some restrictions. Covid-19 epidemic in Italy started as a small wave of 2 infected cases on January 31. It was followed by a bigger wave mainly from local transmissions reported in 6387 cases on March 8. It caused the government to impose a lockdown on 8 March to the whole country as a way to suppress the pandemic. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the lockdown and awareness dynamics on infection in Italy over the period of January 31 to July 17 and how the impact varies across different lockdown scenarios in both periods before and after implementation of the lockdown policy. The findings SEIR reveal that implementation lockdown has minimised the social distancing flattening the curve. The infections associated with COVID-19 decreases with quarantine initially then easing lockdown will not cause further increasing transmission until a certain period which is explained by public high awareness. Completely removing lockdown may lead to sharp transmission second wave. Policy implementation and limitation of the study were evaluated at the end of the paper. Keywords COVID-19 - Lockdown - Epidemic model - SEIR - Awareness - Dynamical systems.

In this article we study solutions to second order linear difference equations with variable coefficients. Under mild conditions we provide closed form solutions using finite continued fraction representations. The proof of the results are elementary and based on factoring a quadratic shift operator. As an application, we obtain two new generalized continued fraction formulas for the mathematical constant π 2 .