This study developed and validated a Mathematics Anxiety Scale for Students (MASS) that can be used to measure the level of mathematics anxiety that students experience in school settings and help them overcome anxiety and perform better in mathematics achievement. We conducted a series of preliminary analyses and panel reviews to evaluate quality of items initially developed for the MASS. The 65 items that measure four domains of mathematics anxiety (nature of mathematics, learning strategy, test/performance, and environment) were finally selected to constitute the final version of the MASS and were administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,339 Korean middle school and high school students to validate the scale. Psychometric properties including descriptive statistics, reliability measures, factorial structure, and correlations with external criteria were examined to provide validity evidences of the final scale. This study contains a detailed description of the entire process of developing and validating the MASS, including the itemselection procedures and psychometric properties of the scale. We believe that the MASS, developed in this study, provides basic but very essential information for predicting specific factors that can cause such anxiety among students.

The use of confidence intervals (CIs) for making a statistical inference is gaining popularity in research communities. To evaluate college statistics instructors’ readiness to teach CIs, this study explores their attitudes toward teaching CIs in elementary statistics courses, and toward using CIs in inferential statistics. Data were collected with a survey that classifies instructors’ attitudes on the basis of three previously established pedagogical components: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Based on the survey responses from 270 participants, we created three profiles (subgroups) via latent profile analysis, and identified each profile’s pattern of attitudes toward CIs and common characteristics of the instructors that fit each profile. In addition, we compared the profiles across groupings created by six variables: gender, academic background, statistics teaching experience, subject preference, degree level, and desire to improve teaching. The results of the latent profile analysis support three profiles within the population of statistics instructors, and the results of the comparative analysis of teacher characteristics indicate that the six variables are moderate to strong predictors of the grouping of the sample into three profiles.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The study in this paper considers how high school students’ attitudes toward and interest in mathematics could be promoted by conjoining the learning of mathematics with the learning of social science topics. Survey instrument was developed to measure student attitudes toward mathematics and social science subjects and to evaluate student beliefs on learning mathematics embedded in social science topics. Data were collected from high school students in Korea by administering pre- and post-tests: students were intervened with examples of math problems embedded in certain social contexts. The findings indicate that high school students’ experience of solving mathematics problems embedded in social contexts positively affects the promotion of their attitudes toward and beliefs on both mathematics and social science subjects.

No abstract

No abstract