Exploring math anxiety in pre-service Elementary School teachers

Abstract

The negative attitudes of teachers, such as anxiety to some teaching materials, can be transmitted to their students. Therefore, make the approach to an affective component that influences attitudes toward mathematics of prospective teachers of E. Primary seems appropriate
if we consider the academic performance of students in the Spanish educational system. According to scores from the latest PISA 2009, its results are still below the OECD average in this area of knowledge. As evidenced by several previous studies, anxiety toward mathematics is a factor that is present in the negative attitudes of teacher conditional on the teaching-learning and students' academic performance. In this research we made an examination to this variable in students of first year of teaching in elementary education from the University of Granada. The results indicate that anxiety toward mathematics is present in 8 out of 10 subjects who participated in this study.