Browsing by Subject "matematiikan osa-alueet"

This research focuses on 6th graders self-efficacy in different fields of mathematics. Focus is on what is overall efficacy in different fiends of mathematics and does gender make a difference on that. Interest is also on does individuals have different self-efficacy in different areas of mathematics. Self-efficacy is Albert Banduras theory where individual evaluates one’s efficacy ahead of a task. Former research shows that there are four aspects that influences to self-efficacy and those are: performance outcomes, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological feedback. Performance outcomes are centric to self-efficacy in mathematics. In this research there are four fields of mathematics: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and statistics and those are from the Finnish curriculum. There are loads of research about self-efficacy and mathematics but almost none of it compares different fields of mathematics or even evaluates efficacy in different fields. Most of the research focuses on how to improve self-efficacy in different fields if mathematics is separated to different fields at all. Researchers often measures people’s ability to count and separates mathematics into different areas and people experience different areas differently. Self-efficacy is related to a specific task and that’s why in this research I’m going to explore self-efficacy in different fields of mathematics. 69 sixth graders took part to this study and 33 of participants were girls, 32 boys, 2 non-binary and 2 didn’t want to give this information. This study was made as a survey where participants had to evaluate one’s self-efficacy on 12 different mathematic exercises. From every field of mathematics there were three questions that were differing in challenge. To get suitable math exercises I used primary school material. Participants saw the exercises for a particular time so that they couldn’t count the exercises but only assess their efficacy. The scale was from 1 to 5. Participants self-efficacy mean in different fields of mathematics was above four in every field and tests showed that there wasn’t statistically significant difference between genders in self-efficacy. Repeated measures variance analysis showed statistically significantly that individ- ual’s self-efficacy is different in arithmetic and algebra as well as in arithmetic and statistics. Self-efficacy seems to be dissenting in different fields of mathematics.