beliefs, anxiety, and avoiding failure in mathematics信仰,数学焦虑,避免失败.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Child Development Research Volume 2012, Article ID 396071, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2012/396071 Research Article Beliefs, Anxiety, and Avoiding Failure in Mathematics Steve Chinn Faculty of Education, Health and Sciences, University of Derby, Derby DE22 1GB, UK Correspondence should be addressed to Steve Chinn, steve.chinn@ Received 1 June 2012; Revised 26 August 2012; Accepted 29 August 2012 Academic Editor: Ann Dowker Copyright © 2012 Steve Chinn. 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. Mathematics anxiety has been the subject of several books and numerous research papers, suggesting that it is a significant issue for many people. Children and adults develop strategies to cope with this anxiety, one of which is avoidance. This paper presents data taken from over 2500 mathematics test papers in order to compare the levels of accuracy and the frequency of the use of the “no attempt” strategy, that is, avoidance, for arithmetic problems given to children aged from 10 years to adults aged up to 49 years from across the UK. 1. Introduction necessarily make them helpful in creating a positive student attitude to mathematics, especially for those who have The difficulties in learning mathematics are a fascinating and difficulties with learning mathematics or, indeed, mathemat- complex area for study. The interactions between factors that ics learning difficulties. For example, Mtetwa and Garofalo can be attributed to the cognitive domain and t