Journal of Education & Social Policy

Mathematics Anxiety and Other Psycho Didactic Aspects in University Students
Valéria ŠVECOVÁ

Abstract
In Slovakia there is no research into mathematical anxiety and its impact on mathematics. Our goal was to create a tool for measuring mathematical anxiety that would be adapted to Slovak conditions. Our research studied the relationship between individual need for cognitive structure and three forms of anxiety (math, state, and trait). The sample comprised 184 students of two specializations from the Faculty of Education (63 students of primary education – UPV and 121 students of pre-school and elementary education – PEP). We focused on the performance in the Fractions Test, PNS, STAI, and original version of the math anxiety scale (Sarmány-Schuller, & Švecová, 2017). We established the level of the mathematical performance in fractions (MPF) latent variable for every student. We calculated correlations between individual variables (MPF, DFS, RLS, M-Anxiety, S-Anxiety, and T-Anxiety) for each group of students. The results show significant differences in the mean values of latent variables between groups (PEP and UPV), UPV students achieved statistically more significant results in MPF. There were no statistically significant differences in other variables. It is noteworthy that UPV students showed lower need for structure and mathematical anxiety but showed higher degree of anxiety.

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