Mathematics: I don't like it! I like it! Very much, a little, not at all... Social support and emotions in students from 2nd and 3rd cycles of education

Abstract

This research analyses achievement emotions and their relationship to perceived classroom support (teacher and peers) as well as the effects of grade, achievement and gender on emotions in a specific subject domain: mathematics. The participants were 1.494 Portuguese students from the sixth and eighth grades who were asked about their perceptions of teacher and peer support and their achievement emotions towards mathematics (Boredom, Hopelessness, Anger, Anxiety, Enjoyment, Pride and Relief) in two different settings (classroom and test). Results provide empirical evidence that student perceptions of classroom support were positively related to positive activating emotions and negatively related to negative emotions. Furthermore students with higher mathematics grades were found to have higher scores in positive emotions and lower scores in negative emotions in both classroom and test situations. A decrease in positive emotions and an increase of negative emotions in older students were also found. In regard to gender the analysis highlighted that positive class emotions were not significantly different, and show a significant effect on Anxiety with girls achieving higher scores than boys. In the test situation gender had a significant effect on Hopelessness, Anxiety and Relief, with girls showing higher scores than boys. For positive test emotions boys reported more Enjoyment and Pride than girls.

Emotional profiles regarding maths among primary school children – A two-year longitudinal study

“…Furthermore, although our results are similar to those in past research among older students (Ahmed et al 2013;Mata et al 2017;Monteiro et al 2017), when comparing them with the results obtained by Vierhaus et al (2016) with German primary school students, some differences are found regarding enjoyment: the German research revealed high and stable levels of enjoyment from second to fifth grade. In our research, Portuguese students showed a decreasing pattern from third to fourth grade, similar to what was found for older students in diverse studies (Ahmed et al 2013;Mata et al 2017;Pinxten et al 2014).…”

“…However, enjoyment and boredom presented reversed emotional pathways: enjoyment decreased significantly and continuously, while boredom significantly increased. Overall, these results are similar to those identified in older students in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (Ahmed et al 2013;Mata et al 2017;Monteiro et al 2017;Vierhaus et al 2016), indicating that this pattern begins very early, even when students are at the beginning of their school process. Several reasons have been offered to explain these reverse patterns of positive and negative emotions throughout schooling, which are similar to the negative changes already identified in motivation research (Wigfield and Eccles 2000).…”

“…A decrease in enjoyment and an increase in boredom related to maths over time was expected. There were no expectations regarding anxiety, as previous findings are not consistent (e.g., Ahmed et al 2013;Monteiro et al 2017;Raccanello et al 2013). 2.…”

“…An interest in studying the different achievement emotions throughout schooling has emerged in recent years (Pekrun and Perry 2014). Most studies have used either crosssectional (e.g., Monteiro et al 2017;Raccanello, Brondino, and Bernardi 2013) or longitudinal methodologies (Ahmed et al 2013;Mata et al 2017;Pinxten, Marsh, Fraine, Noortgate, and Van Damme 2014;Wang, Chow, Hofkens, and Salmela-Aro 2015), focusing on students from fourth through eleventh grades. The findings of cross-sectional studies are in general agreement, revealing higher intensity of positive emotions (e.g., enjoyment, pride, and relief) for younger students and higher intensity of negative emotions (e.g., anger, boredom) for older students, in the domain both of mathematics (Monteiro et al 2017;Raccanello et al 2013) and language (Raccanello et al 2013).…”

A Rasch Analysis of the School-Related Well-Being (SRW) Scale: Measuring Well-Being in the Transition from Primary to Secondary School

“…A few studies also examined gender differences regarding well-being at school, but the findings are not always consistent [15,23]. The literature on this issue is not conclusive: Coherently with results concerning the motivational domain, gender differences for wellbeing are usually different for different school domains and sometimes they concern only some components of school-related well-being [24][25][26].…”