Students suffer maths anxiety in Qatar
Doha, The Gulf Observer: A Qatar University study led by Prof. Ahmed Abdulrahman Al Emadi, Professor of Psychological Sciences at the College of Education QU, has revealed that many Grade 7 to 12 students suffer from high maths anxiety in Qatar.
Prof. Al Emadi has been working with a group of math, science, psychology and engineering scholars on a multidisciplinary project funded by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) through their National Priorities Research Program–Cluster (NPRP-C) since January 2021.
According to the study titled “PRP-C Project: Promoting Sustainable Development of K12 STEM Education in Qatar in a Digital Age,” published in the latest issue of Qatar University Research Magazine, around 12,000 students were sampled in the first subproject of the study.
One in five students suffers high maths anxiety in Qatar: QU study
“A large-scale epidemiological study on more than 12,000 students from grade 7 to 12 in a wide range of government schools in Qatar reported that 1 in 5 students suffers from a high level of math anxiety, with a higher prevalence of math anxiety in female students,” the study said.
The study also discovered that high-school students in the “Arts” were found to experience higher levels of math anxiety and science anxiety than those in the “Sciences” track, regardless of the student’s gender. Therefore, this suggests that STEM career success requires good knowledge of STEM domains and positive emotions towards math and science.
In the second subproject, researchers sampled K12 Science and Math teachers about implementing STEM through Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Framework (TPACK) in Qatar are investigated.
According to the findings, the influence of teachers’ contextual and background factors of teachers on their views of the TPACK-PBL in STEM varied depending mainly on the components of TPACK studied. The study also concluded that specialism in education and gender is significant and influential for teachers’ views of TPACK-PBL in STEM. On the other hand, teachers’ primary specialism and teaching subjects are notable for views of TPACK-PBL in STEM.
The report also revealed that other studies aim to develop and implement a teacher professional development program using PBL pedagogical intervention to support K12 science and math teachers in Qatar to develop TPACK-STEM and to learn how to implement PBL in their teaching practices.
