Assessment of the Effects of Affective Student Characteristics and Educational Background on Mathematics Achievement at the Level of Higher Education

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2010 in the subject Sociology - Knowledge and Information, grade: A, Atlantic International University (School of Social and Human Studies), course: Doctorate in Education, language: English, abstract: The primary purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of individual student affective factors and educational background on mathematics achievement among higher education students as measured by semester grades in the core mathematics courses. Student Locus of Control, Self-Efficacy, and Mathematics Anxiety were the specific individual student affective factors that were examined in the study. Educational backgrounds of the students were examined as an attempt to explain the differences in mathematics performance at the higher education level. To achieve this, high school teacher characteristics and instructional practices in influencing students affective factors were examined. All of the analyses presented were performed on data collected for the study from two institutions of higher education in Cameroon for the student participants and from high school mathematics teachers of the English-Speaking and the French-Speaking subsystems of education. The results of the study show that student internal locus of control, high mathematics self-efficacy, and Mathematics Anxiety were associated with performance in mathematics at the higher education level. The results also revealed a high significant difference in the performance of the students in mathematics from the two educational backgrounds, the English-Speaking and French-Speaking. The results of the study revealed that the English-Speaking subsystem of education is suffering from an acute shortage of qualified high school mathematics teachers. The results show that only 10.5% of the high school mathematics teachers who participated in the study had postgraduate qualifications as against 56.9% for mathematics teachers of the French-Speaking subsystem. The study recommends the need to replace the present GCE Advanced Level Further Mathematics syllabus with one that reflects the view that Further Mathematics is a subject studied mainly by potential mathematics graduates. The syllabus should have, as one of its objectives, the provision of a link between High School Mathematics and University Mathematics. While improving on the syllabus and the examination system, due consideration should also be given to the problem of acute shortage of qualified high school mathematics teachers for the English-Speaking subsystem of education in Cameroon.