Mathematics Anxiety and Pre Service Teachers
Mathematics anxiety has been a topic of interest since the 1950s. It has been shown that apprehensive elementary mathematics teachers unintentionally transfer anxiety to students in their classroom. In this study we assessed the change in 34 pre service teacher's anxiety, self efficacy and perception of ability during and after a content specific mathematics course. This study used a mixed method approach for analyze data. The results suggests that anxiety decreased over the semester and perception of ability and self efficacy increased. The levels of confidence with the material were recorded before and after three exams in the course. The pre service teacher's change in levels of confidence following the exams rose from an average of 2.98 to a 4.30 level out of 5. We chose three students from the participants who gave different pictures of their feelings towards mathematics to investigate in detail.