Understanding Students? Perceptions of Difficulty and the Effect Difficulty Has on Mathematical Anxiety

There exists a growing atmosphere surrounding mathematics that allows individuals to exclaim their belief they are deficient in math without any societal judgement. Compared to a state like being illiterate, we have reached a stage where it is acceptable to be math illiterate as well as hate math. To discover why so many people have this strong distaste towards math, we look towards the difficulty level of the subject. Students cite difficulty as one of the main reasons that they dislike math, so to fully understand the issue at hand, we must first understand students? perceptions of difficulty in mathematics. To this end, we use existing research to develop a survey targeting common issues in algebra that asks the students to complete the problems and describe to us what they think may be challenging about that problem. We then compare and contrast students? reactions to our own hypotheses