Structure of a questionnaire to assess anxiety towards mathematics among engineering students
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The aim of this article is to establish the factor structure of a questionnaire for the assessment of anxiety towards mathematics among undergraduate engineering students, and to study the results of its implementation. Even though mathematics is essential in engineering, anxiety is increasingly seen as one of the main causes of aversion to the subject and high failure rates. The first phase of the study consisted of an exploratory factor analysis involving 627 secondary school students, in order to validate a Likert-type scale questionnaire. The second phase consisted of a confirmatory factor analysis with a sample involving 215 engineering students, from which two factors were obtained: ‘anxiety towards assessment’ and ‘anxiety towards numbers and mathematical operations’. The results reveal a relationship between the two factors and higher levels of ‘anxiety towards assessment’. This relationship and other values obtained from the questionnaires suggest that continuous assessment may help to reduce the distorting effect of anxiety on mathematical performance.
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