Many Korean universities take crossed-application admission system.
Under such admission system, students who are in lack of basic knowledges of mathematics may be admitted to some colleges requiring suitable mathematical training such as college of...
Many Korean universities take crossed-application admission system.
Under such admission system, students who are in lack of basic knowledges of mathematics may be admitted to some colleges requiring suitable mathematical training such as college of sciences or engineering.
Such students may be expected to have a great deal of difficulties in studying mathematics in the university. To cope with it, a number Korean universities provide pre-calculus courses for them.
In this thesis we are interested in math anxiety caused by mathematical incompetence. More concretely speaking, we investigate following problems;
Is there any notable difference between math-anxiety of students who should join the pre-calculus classes and that of students with relatively better mathematical training in two major area of math-anxiety;
1. mathematical activity in daily life,
2. test-anxiety
Finally, we investigate correlation of math-anxieties caused by negative mind on numbers and prejudice on mathematical thoughts for both groups of students.
Using modified questionaires of Suinn’s MARS-A, a survey is conducted on freshmen of Pukyong National University including 153 students (Group A) who mandatorily join pre-calculus classes.
After going through statistical treatment of data via SPSS, we have following consequences :
1. There is no significant differences in math-anxiety of both groups caused by mathematical activity in daily life. In other words, some students with relatively good mathematical backgrounds also feel uncomfortable with application of mathematics to problems in real life.
2. Both groups of students show test anxiety. Although its not much serious difference, students in Group A show slightly higher math-anxiety.
3. There is a quantity correlation between math anxiety in daily life and math anxiety caused by negative factors. For example, in daily life people might feel math anxiety by lack of confidence or negative prejudice when they think about their pension and retirement money or try to calculate how much money they have to save.