Fear of Mathematics Correlates Self-Esteem and Anxiety among Adolescent Students: A Descriptive, Relational and Cross Sectional Study

The aim of this study is to investigate the correlation between adolescent student respondents’ Fear of Mathematics and self-esteem in relation to their anxiety levels and as well as to verify the gender differences in these two anxieties and self-esteem; to investigate whether the educational qualification of the parent influences the fear of mathematics & also to examine the predictors of Self-Esteem and Anxiety from Fear of Mathematics among the adolescent student respondents’. In this study the researcher used the random stratified sampling method. Data was obtained using a 24-item Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale-Revised (MARS-R), 10-item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and 21 item Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). The scores of the three Tests were analyzed by using Karl Pearson Correlation Coefficient to investigate the correlation between Fear of mathematics, Self-Esteem and anxiety level and an independent samples t-test in order to examine gender differences in Fear of Mathematics, Self-esteem and anxiety level, one way ANOVA Test to investigate the difference in demographic variables across their selected categorical variables and also the Linear Regression Analysis to find the influence of Fear of Mathematics on Self-Esteem and Anxiety level. A total of 240 adolescent student respondents aged between 15 and 17were involved in this study, of three different schools from Bangalore. Of the total 120 male and 120 female. The study concludes that a significant negative correlation between fear of math and self-esteem (r =- .277* at p<0.01), a significant positive correlation between fear of mathematics and anxiety (r = .471* at p<0.01) furthermore there was a significant negative correlation between anxiety and self-esteem (r = -.371* at p<0.01). No significant gender differences were found in Fear of mathematics, Self-esteem and in their anxiety level among the adolescent’s student respondents. Analysis of Variance analysis (ANOVA) indicated that there are significant differences found in Fear of Mathematics with regard to Educational Qualification of both the father (p = 0.002 where p<.05 ) and mother (p = 0.028 where p<.05), for those student respondents whose parents were below under-graduation. Linear Regression analysis indicated that Fear of Mathematics influences Self-Esteem negatively by 5.2% and Anxiety level positively by 22.2%, asβ values indicate that the variable emerges as a significant predictor. This study emphasizes the significance in understanding the fear of mathematics and its relational study with self esteem and anxiety among the adolescents. Implications of the findings are further discussed in the study