• The Mathematical Education
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• v.45 no.3 s.114
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• pp.251-262
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• 2006

This study investigates 628 high school students' math dislike tendencies by their math achievement levels. The findings show that, firstly, as the sample students' math achievement level decreases, the number of dislike factors increase. Secondly, students' math dislike factors are differentiated by their math achievement levels. Math high achievers show high math disliking tendency by teacher factor. Middle achievers show high math disliking tendency by complex application and relation factors. Low achievers show high math disliking tendency by comprehension factor. Finally the math disliking factors affecting the level of math achievement are influenced by schools and grades that students' attend. While math disliking factors such as comprehension factor, teacher factor, affection factor are generally present among sample schools, exceptionally JS high school students(high achieving students) are only affected by mentality factor. In addition, mentality factor affects the second grade students only. The implications of the study argue that students' math disliking tendencies could be systematically reduced by paying attention to such dependent variables students' achievement levels, grade, school characteristics, and independent variables including teacher, application, mentality, comprehension, and affection.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.217-239
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• 2001

To lessen the ratio of under achievers is one of the most urgent task which recent school mathematics education is confronted with. To cope with this problem efficiently, math. teachers should know more specifically and concretely the causes that make the students dislike mathematics. But actually, there are too many reasons for these situations. So, in this paper, we tried to devise a tool to analyze and measure each student's math. disliking status. We proceeded this research via the following procedures. 1. Grasping the causes which make the students dislike mathematics as specifically as possible. To obtain this, we asked more than 300 of secondary school students to write down their thoughts about school mathematics. 2. Analyzing the responses, we abstracted 74 numbers of items which were supposed to be the causes for secondary school students'mathematics disliking. 3. With these items we made a test to measure students'aptitude for each item. 4. With this test paper, we tested over 800 of secondary school students. Through factor analysis and theoretical argument, we categorized the 74 items into 11 groups whose names were defined as factors of mathematics disliking. 5. For each of these 11 factors, we developed a norm which could serve as standard of comparison in measuring each student's mathematics disliking status. Using this tool teachers were able to describe each student's traits of mathematics disliking more specifically.

• 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.