Assessing the Attitudes of Japanese Junior High School Students towards Course Units of Mathematics
A Focus on Learners with 'No Problem' Feeling about Studying the Subject
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/ejsmt.vol6.1.3.2019Keywords:
Mathematics Education, Japanese Junior High School Students, Feelings, Correspondence AnalysisAbstract
This article is concerned with the assessment of feelings that Japanese junior high school students have towards unit learning of mathematics courses. To accomplish this purpose, 616 junior high school students of a typical public school were surveyed regarding their feelings towards these course units and a two-step analysis was carried out. The first part consisted of the tabulation of Likert scale type survey with 5 levels of evaluation from 1 (‘not good at’) through 5 (‘good at’) aimed to evaluate their feelings towards learning mathematics in general as part of their educational activity. Next, we looked only into the students who responded ‘no problem’. As a matter of fact, these respondents accounted for 181 students in all with 44 of them in first year, 75 in second year, and 63 in third year. Now focusing strictly on these students, we performed a correspondence analysis of their feelings towards the course units. The results are discussed in terms of this correspondence analysis, which made it clear that despite the fact that the students do not feel resistance towards learning the subjects of mathematics, they have ‘good at’ and ‘not good at’ feelings towards particular unit learning independent of the gender. In the paper, we discussed these findings in detail.
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References
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Mata, M. D. L., Monteiro, V., & Peixoto, F. (2012). Attitudes towards Mathematics: Effects of Individual, Motivational, and Social Support Factors. Child development research, vol. 2012, Article ID 876028, 10 pages, 2012. doi: 10.1155/2012/876028.
Hannula, M. S., Maijala, H., Pehkonen, E., & Nurmi, A. (2005). Gender comparisons of pupils’ self-confidence in mathematics learning. Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education, 10(3-4), 29-42.
Lubienski, S. T., Robinson, J. P., Crane, C. C., & Ganley, C. M. (2013). Girls’ and boys’ mathematics achievement, affect, and experiences: Findings from ECLS-K. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(4), 634-645.
Davadas, S. D., & Lay, Y. F. (2017). Factors Affecting Students’ Attitude toward Mathematics: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 14(1), 517-529.
Lazarides, R., & Watt, H. M. (2015). Girls’ and boys’ perceived mathematics teacher beliefs, classroom learning environments and mathematical career intentions. Contemporary educational psychology, 41, 51-61.
Ampadu, E. (2012). Students’ Perceptions of their Teachers’ Teaching of Mathematics: The Case of Ghana. International Online Journal of Educational Sciences, 4(2).
Anyagh, P. I., Honmane, O., & Abah, J. (2018). Secondary School Students’ Perception of Teachers’ Attitude towards Learning in Mathematics in Wukari Metropolis, Taraba State, Nigeria. International Journal of Research and Review, 5(5), 69-75.
Gherasim, L. R., Butnaru, S., & Mairean, C. (2013). Classroom environment, achievement goals and maths performance: Gender differences. Educational Studies, 39(1), 1-12.
Koutrouba, K. (2016). Defining Teacher Effectiveness in Secondary Education: The Perceptions of Greek Students. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 15(10).
Samuelsson, M., & Samuelsson, J. (2016). Gender differences in boys’ and girls’ perception of teaching and learning mathematics. Open Review of Educational Research, 3(1), 18-34.
Patrick, H., Ryan, A. M., & Kaplan, A. (2007). Early adolescents’ perceptions of the classroom social environment, motivational beliefs, and engagement. Journal of educational psychology, 99(1), 83.
Khandaghi, M. A., & Farasat, M. (2011). The effect of teacher’s teaching style on students’ adjustment. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 1391-1394.
Izuta, G., & Nishikawa, T. (2017). Assessing the Sense of ‘Good at’ and ‘Not Good At’ towards Learning Topics of Mathematics with Conjoint Analysis, AIP Conference Proceedings, 1847, 030014-1–030014-7, doi: 10.1063/1.4983892.
Nishikawa, T., & Izuta, G. (2017). A Characterization of Junior High Students with Anxieties towards Learning Mathematics. In Proceedings of 2017 International Conference on Education, Psychology, and Social Sciences, CD-ROM Format, Bangkok, Thailand, August 2-4, 404-413.
Nishikawa, T., & Izuta, G. (2017). An Assessment of Learning Difficulty Level of Math Class Topics- A Case Study of a Japanese Public Junior High School. International Journal of Educational Science and Research, 17(1), 105-118.
MEXT: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. (2008). Junior High School Teaching Guide for the Japanese Course of Study: Mathematics No.2.
Retrieved from http://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__ics (accessed Sep 2018).
R Coe Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org/. (accessed Sep 2018).
Sebastien, L., Julie, J. & Francois, H. (2008). FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 25(1), 1-18. doi: 10.18637/jss.v025.i01.
Kassambara, A., & Mundt, F. (2017). factoextra: Extract and Visualize the Results of Multivariate Data Analyses. R package version 1.0.5. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=factoextra. (accessed Sep 2018).
Bendixen, M. (1996). A practical guide to the use of correspondence analysis in marketing research. Marketing Research On-Line, 1(1), 16-36.
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Published
2019-06-24
How to Cite
Nishikawa, T., & Izuta, G. (2019). Assessing the Attitudes of Japanese Junior High School Students towards Course Units of Mathematics: A Focus on Learners with ’No Problem’ Feeling about Studying the Subject. EDUCATUM Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology, 6(1), 15–28. https://doi.org/10.37134/ejsmt.vol6.1.3.2019
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