A research on the elementary school students’ math fears in Turkey

The purpose of this study is to examine the views of elementary school students, parents and teachers on the reasons of mathematic fears. For this purpose, the interview questions asked the students (three questions), parents (two questions) and teachers (three questions) individually. In this qualitative research, we interview 140 elementary school students, 70 parents and 20 mathematics teachers in public elementary schools that are randomly determined in Turkey. The results show that one-quarter of the students are afraid of mathematics, experience stress as a result of extreme importance the families impose to math course, not be satisfied that courses have been trained with the existing teaching methods and techniques. As an overall conclusion, elementary school students 'levels of math fear, and this is causing math fear as students' general fear of the variables investigated in this research was low. The parents attribute the greatest importance to mathematics, and teachers need to change their traditional approaches of mathematics teaching to a more moderate and democratic one. The suggestions are presented at the end of the paper for best practices to alleviate students’ math fear.