Negative relationships between mathematics anxiety and achievement appear in many countries globally (Lee, 2009; OECD, 2013), suggesting that mathematics anxiety could be an underconsidered factor in regions with persistently low mathematics achievement. We draw on a national sample of students and their teachers in Belize to examine relations between mathematics anxiety and achievement. The data replicated the negative relationships between students' math anxiety and achievement observed in many higher achieving, higher resourced regions, and importantly also revealed that teachers' mathematics anxiety predicted their students' mathematics attitudes and sometimes achievement. The effects were small overall so the robustness of this relationship is not clear, but they provide novel data toward building a comprehensive theory of mathematics anxiety's relationship to achievement across cultural, gender and age contexts, and offer insight into how addressing mathematics anxiety might improve mathematics teaching and achievement in low resourced countries. Mathematical proficiency is a global area of concern, and improving the efficacy of mathematics education is viewed by many as a key to increasing nations' successful participation in the global economy. In light of the growing
Las relaciones negativas entre la ansiedad matemática y el rendimiento matemático aparecen en muchos países a nivel mundial (OCDE, 2013; Lee, 2009), lo que sugiere que la ansiedad matemática podría ser un factor subestimado en regiones con un rendimiento matemático persistentemente bajo. Nos basamos en una muestra nacional de estudiantes y sus docentes en Belice para analizar las relaciones entre la ansiedad matemática y el rendimiento matemático. Los datos replican la relación negativa entre estas variables observada en muchas regiones con mejor rendimiento y mayores recursos y, lo que es más importante, también revelan que la ansiedad matemática de los docentes predice las actitudes de sus estudiantes hacia las matemáticas, y algunas veces su rendimiento académico en matemáticas. En términos generales, los efectos no fueron cuantitativamente importantes, por lo cual la robustez de esta relación no es clara, pero aportan resultados novedosos para construir una teoría integral de la relación entre la ansiedad y el rendimiento académico en matemáticas en diferentes contextos culturales, etarios y de género, y brindan información sobre cómo podría mejorar la enseñanza y el rendimiento académico en matemáticas en países de bajos recursos a través del abordaje de la ansiedad matemática.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought school systems to a halt across the globe. In Belize, remote learning was challenging owing to limited access to educational technologies and lack of familiarity with remote learning among teachers. This study draws on national standardized exams and specific achievement testing to assess pandemic-related learning losses at the primary education level. Based on administrative data, the study also analyzes changes in student enrollment, dropout rates, and grade repetition at the primary and secondary levels. We find that school closures resulted in significant learning losses in English language and mathematics at the end of primary education. Matching international trends, the largest losses occurred in mathematics. Among the strands of mathematics content, the one showing the most dramatic loss is number sense in primary schools and geometry in secondary schools; the achievement level in both dropped by around 55 percent. Also, in line with international trends, average student repetition and dropout rates surged at the secondary level after prolonged school closures. The largest increase in dropout and repetition levels were found in urban secondary schools: the average dropout rate increased by 51 percent in the 2020/21 school year, compared with the average rate in the year prior to the start of the pandemic, while the repetition rate increased from 6.7 percent in the 2019/20 school year to 11.6 percent in the 2021/22 school year.
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