Mathematics Anxiety and Other Psycho Didactic Aspects in University Students

Abstract

In Slovakia there is no research into mathematical anxiety and its impact on mathematics. Our goal was to create a tool for measuring mathematical anxiety that would be adapted to Slovak conditions. Our research studied the relationship between individual need for cognitive structure and three forms of anxiety (math, state, and trait). The sample comprised 184 students of two specializations from the Faculty of Education (63 students of primary education-UPV and 121 students of preschool and elementary education-PEP). We focused on the performance in the Fractions Test, PNS, STAI, and original version of the math anxiety scale (Sarmány-Schuller, & Švecová, 2017). We established the level of the mathematical performance in fractions (MPF) latent variable for every student. We calculated correlations between individual variables (MPF, DFS, RLS, M-Anxiety, S-Anxiety, and T-Anxiety) for each group of students. The results show significant differences in the mean values of latent variables between groups (PEP and UPV), UPV students achieved statistically more significant results in MPF. There were no statistically significant differences in other variables. It is noteworthy that UPV students showed lower need for structure and mathematical anxiety but showed higher degree of anxiety.

Relation between Pupils’ Mathematical Self-Efficacy and Mathematical Problem Solving in the Context of the Teachers’ Preferred Pedagogies

“…The pupils' experience of solving a mathematical problem successfully may lead to a positive attitude towards mathematics. This also seems to hold true in reverse, i.e., students who have a positive attitude to mathematics are more successful at solving mathematical problems [53][54][55][56][57]. The results of several authors show that success in solving mathematical problems is influenced by students' procedural skills, including their ability to use (dominantly mathematical) tools productively and to choose an appropriate representation in the mathematization of problem situations [58][59][60][61]; their level of control of processes related to mathematical activity, such as reasoning, communication, generalization, or mathematical modeling [62][63][64][65][66][67][68]; and the level of their conceptual understanding of mathematical concepts [69][70][71][72][73].…”

“…As early as in 1983, Betz and Hackett [80] studied mathematics self-efficacy in terms of pupils' individual judgments about their capabilities to solve some specific mathematical problems and about their grade in mathematics. This is a domain that has been linked to a number of other factors, such as negative correlation with mathematical anxiety [57,84,85], or positive correlation with performance in mathematical problem-solving [86]. The higher the self-efficacy of an individual is, the more cognitively demanding problems the given respondent is willing to solve [87].…”

Relations between Generalization, Reasoning and Combinatorial Thinking in Solving Mathematical Open-Ended Problems within Mathematical Contest

“…The ability to solve complex open-ended problems is anchored in some various different factors including the following: (i) metacognitive knowledge [6,7], (ii) positive attitude towards mathematics [8][9][10][11][12], (iii) mastering mathematics processes as are reasoning, generalization, communicating the results or mathematical modeling [13][14][15][16][17][18] and (iv) high level of mathematical proficiency in both, procedures [19,20] and conceptual understanding [21][22][23], including arithmetic, algebraic and combinatorial thinking. These aforementioned factors are not isolated, but they rather support each other mutually in the influence of the ability to solve complex open mathematical problems [24,25].…”