attitudes to mathematics in primary school children小学生对数学的态度.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Child Development Research Volume 2012, Article ID 124939, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2012/124939 Research Article Attitudes to Mathematics in Primary School Children Ann Dowker,1 Karina Bennett,2 and Louise Smith2 1 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK 2 St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY, UK Correspondence should be addressed to Ann Dowker, ann.dowker@psy.ox.ac.uk Received 15 June 2012; Revised 24 September 2012; Accepted 8 October 2012 Academic Editor: Helga Krinzinger Copyright © 2012 Ann Dowker et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 44 Grade 3 children and 45 Grade 5 children from English primary schools were given the British abilities scales basic number skills subtest, and a Mathematics Attitude and Anxiety Questionnaire, using pictorial rating scales to record their Self-rating for maths, Liking for maths, Anxiety about maths, and Unhappiness about poor performance in mathematics. There were few year group differences in attitudes. Boys rated themselves higher than girls, but did not differ significantly in actual performance. Overall, Anxiety was not related to actual performance, but Self-rating was. This relationship between Self-rating and actual performance seemed to develop between Grade 3 and Grade 5. Implications of the findings are discussed. 1. Introduction themselves suffer from mathematics anxiety, and to pre- existing difficulties in numerical cognition