Psychological interventions offer a unique approach to enhancing the educational experience for university students. Unlike traditional teaching methods, these interventions directly address cognitive, emotional, and behavioural factors without requiring changes to course content, delivery methods, or involvement from the teaching team. This…

Many college students consider statistical courses as frightening and demanding, yielding high anxiety and low competence, and correlating with maladaptive academic behaviors and low achievement. With undergraduate students, the present pre-post study compared a supportive online teaching program utilizing mandatory statistical exercises (n = 37)…

The study compared concerns, anxiety, mindsets, and belonging in introductory statistics among Latine students across three higher education institutions. Students at the Predominantly White Institution voiced more concerns about R-coding and lack of prior knowledge. Students at the Hispanic-Serving Institutions voiced more concerns about math…

Low achievement in mathematics begins long before students arrive at college. National data shows that between 60% and 75% of high school seniors in the U.S. are underprepared for college-level mathematics and may end up enrolling in developmental mathematics. Developmental mathematics refers to mathematics courses taken in college that are…

Mathematics educators often know the widespread nature of mathematics anxiety and may even be aware of the debilitating effect it can have on their students. Although educators may develop tricks or tools that seem to help, a comprehensive understanding of what students are experiencing and how the classroom environment can be adjusted to address…

The academic anxiety of university students taking a course in statistics in a college of education was compared to the academic anxiety of students taking other courses. Results from the study indicated that students in statistics classes had higher levels of debilitative anxiety (p < 0.05) and lower levels of self-efficacy (p < 0.01) than…

Current data suggest fewer females than males continue to be interested in engineering and that this gender gap is first evidenced during middle school years. One might expect that female engineering role models would encourage adolescent girls to pursue future careers in engineering and thereby increase the girls' interests in and attitudes…

Administered the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale to Introductory Statistics college students. A high mathematics anxiety was associated with lower performance on a statistics examination. Classroom stress-coping intervention reduced anxiety and physiological stress responses, but did not improve academic performance. (Author/KS)

Math anxiety, or mathophobia, is an irrational fear of mathematics which interferes with the manipulation of numbers. In mild forms it may be only an annoyance, but severe forms may result in total avoidance of numerical operations, with accompanying fears and stress. Three methods for dealing with math anxiety have been developed by various…

Contends that most students have potential to be successful in college level mathematics course if they develop requisite skills, self-motivation, and confidence to overcome academic deficiencies and memories of past negative learning experiences. Sees counselor as potentially useful in providing assessment and intervention strategies to deal with…

This is a record of the proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of the conference is "Mathematics: Essential research, essential practice." The theme draws attention to the importance of developing and maintaining links between research and practice and…