• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.583-613
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• 2010

Mathematics anxiety is likely to be a drag on mathematics learning if that is left alone, and it is important to grasp the cause of mathematics anxiety and devise how to get rid of it. The purpose of this study was to examine the cause of mathematics anxiety among elementary school children, to develop a math-friendly activity program geared toward easing mathematics anxiety and to check the effect of the developed program on the alleviation of mathematics anxiety. The subjects in this study were 32 students in a fourth-grade class in I elementary school located in Dongdaemoon-gu, Seoul. A math-friendly activity program was designed to alleviate the mathematics anxiety of the five subfactors-test anxiety, time constraints, comprehension, learning motivation and parent attitude-on which the students scored higher than their pretest collective averages. The mathematics anxiety pretest data, the objectives and content system of the current 7th national mathematics curriculum and the mathematics textbooks for 4-A and 4-B were analyzed to develop the math-friendly activity program that consisted of psychological remedy (positive thinking training) and non-psychological remedy (mathematics activities). After the program was implemented, we analyze the pretest and posttest mathematics anxiety data to determine the effect of the program. As a result, the collective averages of every student on math anxiety and its subfactors were lower in the posttest than in the pretest.