• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.33-50
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• 2007

Positive attitude toward mathematics is gaining bigger recognition as an important contributing factor to mathematical ability. As a strategy for strengthening affective domain and betterment of mathematics teaching and loaming, classifying students by their causes for liking or disliking mathematics can be an effective way In this study the author tried to devise methods to classify students by their types of math disliking and investigate correlations between mathematical achievements and these math-disliking types from a sample group of 8th graders. To identify the types of reasons why 8th graders dislike mathematics, a questionnaire with 30 items was made firstly. Then by applying the 'Factor analysis' of SPSS, the 30 items were divided into five partitions. Through abstraction of each partition, five math-disliking types, 'Competences', 'Basics', 'Confidences', 'Usefulness', and 'Teachers' were defined. They are expected to help teachers for describing each student's tendency of math-disliking. Further, correlation coefficients between mathematical achievements and each of the five math-disliking type were investigated against 4 groups which were made from sample group by the discrimination of gender and two levels (high and low) of mathematical achievements in cognitive area. As results, the following facts were found. (i) The trends of correlations between cognitive achievement and the five math disliking types were different across the 4 groups at statistically meaningful degrees. (ii) Most of the male students who had math-disliking types were proved to be in the low achievement level. But for the female students, only 50% of students who had math-disliking types were in the low achievement level. (iii) Compared to male students, higher portion of female students had math-disliking types despite their high achievement in cognitive area.