Development of an attitude-towards-using-mathematics scale for high-school students and an analysis of student attitudes

ABSTRACT

This research has been carried out in two stages and has two main objectives. The first aim of the study is to develop a Likert-type scale which is used to determine the attitudes towards the use of mathematics in real life. The second aim is to examine the attitudes of high school students about the use of mathematics in real life according to different variables used in the developed scale. The research was carried out according to the correlational research method, and the participants comprise the sample of 340 and 356 students for the scale development and implementation stages of the study, respectively. As a result of the research, a structure consisting of 23 items and three sub-factors was determined for the scale. In the second stage of the study, it was observed that the student attitudes were at the level corresponding to the ‘undecided’ option of the scale, and they differed significantly according to gender and grade level variables. In addition, it was found that there was a positive and significant relationship between the students’ attitudes towards the use of mathematics and their mathematics achievement.