Μια διερευνητική προσέγγιση του άγχους σε σχέση με την έννοια του ποσοστού σε μαθητές της Α΄ Γυμνασίου

Περίληψη

According to the greek formal curriculum for Mathematics in primary education, the domain of percentage is introduced in 5th and 6th grade and its teaching is concluded during the first year of secondary school. The concept of percentage can be constructed through different lessons such as fractions, decimals, ratio and analogy. Percentages should be taught via lessons which reflect every day situations and problem solving, inasmuch as they allow comparisons of disparate situations and are considered as symbolic representations of the hundredth in decimals and fractions. On the other hand, anxiety causes feelings of unease and occurs unconsciously so it cannot be addressed immediately. More specifically, mathematics anxiety is connected to combinatory unpleasant feelings elicited by children’s low performance in problem solving tasks. The purpose of this study is to investigate how students who attend the first grade of secondary school understand the concept of percentage. For this reason, problem solving tasks were analysed because a link between understanding percentages and specific characteristics of mathematics anxiety has been established in recent studies.