• 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.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.19-39
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• 2003

The purpose of this study is to find out effective ways to take care of the 8th and 10th graders' disposition causing math. disliking. To accomplish this goal, we proceeded as follows : First we categorized the 11 factors recognized as the reasons of math. disliking into 4 math. disliking causes such as psychological f: environmental cause, conceptual cause, relational cause and application related cause. Second, to take care of these tow causes, we developed materials which are closely related with the contents of the 8th and 10th graders' school mathematics. Third with these materials we taught the students who had proved to have the math. disliking trend, for one semester. As a consequence of this experiment we arrived at the following results. As for psychological & environmental causes, 35.7% of the 8th graders and 17% of the 10th graders proved to have been improved significantly. This result shows that the curing of the psychological & environmental causes is more effective in the 8th graders than in the 10th graders. i.e., the curing effects of the students' psychological & environmental cause for disliking math. decline as they get older. As for conceptual causes, 35% of the 5th graders and 30% of the 10th graders proved to have been improved significantly. In case of the 8th graders this ratio was similar to that of the other causes. But as for the 10th graders this ratio was a little low compared with that of the case of relation causes and application related causes. As for relational causes, 35% of the 5th graders and 49% of the 10th graders proved to have been improved significantly. Especially the 10th graders improved greatly. Among the four factors that compose this cause, especially hierarchy and connection factors were effectively cured. On application related causes, 47% of the 5th graders and 57% of the 10th graders proved to have been cured significantly. And among the four types of causes listed above, this was the most successfully cured one. Of the two factors of this cause, the basic application factor appeared to have been improved in all experimental groups. In connection with teaching methods, we found out the followings two facts. First, the more teachers push students to solve their tasks with their own efforts, the higher is the ratio of owe. Second, the more teachers teach students personally, the more effective are the teaching results.