An Investigation of Mathematics Anxiety and Academic Coping Strategies Among High School Students in Vietnam: A Cross-Sectional Study

Increasing numbers of students around the world are suffering from mathematics anxiety. The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between mathematics anxiety and gender, grade, career choices, and academic achievement in Grade 10, 11, and 12 students. This study used the Revised Version of the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale to survey 1,548 high school students (570 males and 978 females) from high schools in Vietnam. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test, Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression were used to analyze data. The results show that there are significant differences in the influence of grade, academic achievement, and students’ career choices on mathematics anxiety. Academic coping strategies, gender, grade, and career choices are significant predictors of mathematics anxiety. Grade 12 students have higher levels of mathematics anxiety than others. Students with high average mathematics scores (9.0–10.0) have higher levels of mathematics anxiety than students with lower scores. Besides, students choosing finance and economics or industrial engineering to pursue into higher education also experienced higher levels of mathematics anxiety than others. This study contributes to the general discussion about the nature of mathematics anxiety and the relationship between mathematics anxiety and academic achievement.

PROACTIVE RESOURCES FOR COPING WITH ACADEMIC STRESS

The article presents the results of a study of proactive coping resources. Proactive coping is currently a new term in the Kazakhstan psychological and pedagogical literature. It can be defined as future-oriented coping, associated with anticipating potential stressors and the early accumulation of resources to identify a possible problem situation and a proactive mindset to resolve it. An analytical review of the literature on the problem under study revealed that proactive coping is associated with the presence in the coping subject of certain environmental conditions and dispositional characteristics that allow him to recognize a potential threat and plan strategies for its removal. The ambiguity in the classification and understanding of academic coping resources directs the attention of researchers to the search for situational and personal parameters that can help the student cope with the stress arising in educational activities. It was revealed that proactive coping with academic stress is provided by reflexive, motivational-volitional, cognitive, affective and communicative resources.

Structural Relationships between Coping Strategies, Self-Efficacy, and Fear of Losing One’s Self-Esteem in Science Class

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between coping strategies (positive coping, projective coping, non-coping and denial coping), self-efficacy, and fear of losing one’s self-esteem among secondary school students in science course. The study group consisted of 381 students studying in a large city located in the eastern part of Turkey. The data of the study were obtained using Academic Coping, Self-efficacy, Fear of losing one's self-esteem scales. Data were analyzed with the structural equality model using the Amos program, and the proposed relationships between variables were tested. According to the results obtained from the research, it was found that the positive coping and projective coping strategy predicted positively and the non-coping strategy negatively on self-efficacy. Self-efficacy negatively predicted the fear of losing one’s self-esteem. Additionally, positive coping, denial coping, and non-coping strategies were observed to positively predict the fear of losing one's self-esteem. Additionally, positive coping, projective coping, non-coping, and denial coping strategies variables together explained 28% of the variance in self-efficacy. The self-efficacy and all of the coping strategies explained 48% of the variance in fear of losing one’s self-esteem.

Examining Academic Coping Strategies Among Black American Students in Terms of Math Resilency

Failure is the most commonly assumed outcome for Black American students studying math, which does not leave much room for understanding how Black American students do succeed in mathematics. Despite this assumption, many Black American students are resilient and able to have positive academic math outcomes. Studies suggest that mathematics literacy in Black American students is linked to identity construction at the intersection of their racial identity and math identity. Using Spencer’s PVEST model as a theoretical framework, the current study examines the need for an inclusive framework that observes and accounts for the many factors that influence students’ educational math outcomes. The current study observes academic coping skills as predictors for math computation outcomes. A group of 146 predominantly Black American students were recruited from an HBCU and completed an in-person computerized easy and hard math task with a word task as the control. The math task measured reaction time and accuracy. Participants also completed a survey with subscales from Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales, Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11, and subscales from the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. Results revealed that none of the predicted coping strategies were able to predict the outcome on the math task. Data exploration was performed and found that comprehension was able to significantly predict impulsivity and academic efficacy, and planning was able to significantly predict impulsivity and academic efficacy.

Academic Coping

Academic coping describes the profile of responses children and adolescents utilize when they encounter challenges, obstacles, setbacks, and failures in their scholastic work. Coping is one of multiple strands of research from a variety of subareas within educational and developmental science that share a common interest in this topic, including work on academic resilience, buoyancy, mastery versus helplessness, tenacity, perseverance, and productive persistence, as well as adaptive help seeking, self-regulated learning, and emotion regulation. These approaches focus on the responses (including emotions and goal-directed behaviors) students actually undertake on the ground when they encounter academic difficulties in their daily lives; patterns of action can be contrasted with the belief systems, motivations, or skill sets that underlie these responses. Since the mid 1980s, several dozen studies have examined academic coping in children and youth from 2nd to 12th grade (ages 7–18), including samples from 29 countries (Skinner & Saxton, 2019). These studies have identified multiple adaptive ways of dealing with academic stress, including problem solving, help seeking, and comfort seeking. These responses are considered productive because they allow students to gather resources and strategies, and so re-engage in demanding tasks with renewed purpose, vigor, and effectiveness. Multiple maladaptive ways of coping have also been identified, such as escape, rumination, or blaming others. These are considered unproductive because when enacted in response to academic demands, they are more likely to trigger disaffection, amplify distress, or provoke negative reactions from social partners. In general, research indicates that students normatively show a profile of coping that is high in adaptive strategies (especially problem solving, help seeking, and support seeking) and low in maladaptive responses. Studies find that students’ adaptive coping is linked to their academic functioning and success, including their educational performance, engagement, persistence, and adjustment to school transitions. In contrast, maladaptive coping is linked to a pattern of poor academic performance, disengagement, and school-related burnout. Students cope more adaptively when they possess motivational assets (such as self-efficacy, relative autonomy, or sense of belonging) and experience interpersonal supports from their parents, teachers, and peers. Studies documenting developmental trends suggest normative improvements in the coping repertoire during elementary school. However, over the transition to middle school in early adolescence, many adaptive ways of coping decline while reliance on maladaptive responses generally increases. Starting in middle adolescence, these problematic trends stabilize, and some studies indicate renewed improvement in coping, especially problem solving. Current research on academic coping faces theoretical, methodological, and applied challenges: (a) theoretically, more comprehensive conceptualizations are needed that integrate coping perspectives with social contextual, motivational, and developmental approaches; (b) methodologically, standard measures are needed that focus on core categories of academic coping, and that utilize allocation scoring; and (c) to further applied work, additional studies are needed that describe and explain normative and differential age-graded changes in adaptive and maladaptive coping across childhood and adolescence. Researchers who study academic coping believe that this work has much to offer educational theories, research, and interventions aimed at understanding how to help children and adolescents develop the capacity to deal constructively with the obstacles and problems they will inevitably encounter during their educational careers.

“I get knocked down but I get up again”: Integrative frameworks for studying the development of motivational resilience in school

Many subareas share a common interest in students’ motivational resilience, defined broadly as patterns of action that allow students to constructively deal with, overcome, recover, and learn from encounters with academic obstacles and failures. However, research in each of these areas often progresses in relative isolation, and studies rarely utilize developmental or social-contextual approaches. As a result, we do not yet have a clear understanding of how to help children and adolescents develop a rich and flexible repertoire of tools to deal productively with everyday academic challenges and difficulties. In this article, we knit together these disparate areas of work to create an integrated developmental and social-contextual framework that can guide the future study of these processes. First, we summarize nine areas of work that focus on students’ actions on the ground when they encounter academic difficulties: academic resilience, mastery versus helplessness, engagement and re-engagement, academic coping, self-regulated learning, adaptive help seeking, emotion regulation, and buoyancy as well as tenacity, perseverance, and productive persistence. In each area, we highlight work that is explicitly developmental and that depicts key social-contextual factors that shape motivational resilience. Second, we sketch an overarching social-contextual and developmental framework that holds a place for each of these processes. Third, we identify multiple areas where cross-fertilization among researchers can contribute to improved educational practice and study of the development of motivational resilience. An overarching goal of this article (and the special section more generally) is to take first steps toward “field building” on this crucial topic.

The development of academic coping across late elementary and early middle school: Do patterns differ for students with differing motivational resources?

The way that students cope with the difficulties and setbacks they encounter daily in their academic work can make a material difference to their learning, school success, and capacity to re-engage with challenging educational activities. Because of their potential importance to students’ everyday academic resilience, educators and researchers are interested in the development of adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping—both how they improve or deteriorate over students’ educational careers and the factors that underlie their differential development. Using information on self-reports of 5 adaptive and 6 maladaptive ways of coping, collected from 1,018 American third through sixth graders in fall and spring of the same school year, this study examined (1) the normative progression of these 11 ways of coping across fall of third to spring of sixth grade, and (2) whether developmental patterns differed for students with differing motivational resources. A generally stable profile of constructive coping was evident during Grades 3 and 4 (in which adaptive strategies were high and maladaptive responses low), followed by modest improvements across fourth to fifth grades. Marked shifts were apparent across the transition to middle school. Compared to spring of fifth grade, students in fall of sixth grade reported lower levels of all adaptive and higher levels of all maladaptive ways of coping, and this trend persisted across the first year of middle school. Although motivational resources did not produce differing developmental trends, they did seem to organize coping. Highest levels of adaptive coping were found for students high in both personal and interpersonal assets, just as the highest levels of maladaptive coping were found for students high in both personal and interpersonal liabilities. Findings suggest that both motivational and developmental approaches are needed to fully account for patterns of age-graded trends in academic coping across late elementary and early middle school.

Optimisme dan Kontrol Diri dengan Coping Stress pada Mahasiswa S1Bimbingan dan Konseling UNNES

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui hubungan antara optimisme dan kontrol diri dengan coping stress terhadap tuntutan akademik pada mahasiswa S1 bimbingan dan konseling UNNES. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian ex post facto dengan sampel berjumlah 157 dari populasi 288 mahasiswa dengan teknik pengambilan sampel proportionate stratifed random sampling. Skala coping stress diadaptasi dari COPE, skala optimisme diadaptasi dari LOT-R, dan skala kontrol diri diadapatasi dari SCS, skala tersebut digu nakan dalam pengumpulan data dengan reliabilitas 0,940, 0,769, dan 0,937. Adapun teknik analisis data menggunakan regresi ganda. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa antara optimisme dengan coping stress memiliki hubungan yang signifikan (R=0,529, f(1,155) = 60,101, p = <0,01), kemudian hubungan antara kontrol diri dengan coping stress juga memiliki hubungan yang signifikan (R=0,366, f(5,150) = 78,544, p = <0,01). Begitu pula antara optimisme dan kontrol diri dengan coping stress juga memiliki hubungan yang signifikan (R=0,892, f(2,155) = 298,581, p = <0,01). Thia research aims to know the relationship between optimism and self control with respect to coping stress academic coping stress in undergraduate student guidance and counseling UNNES. This research is an ex postfacto research with a sample of 157 of the population amounted to 288 students with technique of sampling proportionate stratified random sampling. The scale of coping stress in the adaption of the COPE, the scale of optimism in the adaption of the LOT-R, and the scale of self control in the adaption SCS, the scale used in the collection of data with reliability 0,940, 0,769 and 0,937. As for the analysis techniques using double regression. Results of the study showed that between optimism coping stress have a significant relationship (R= 0,529 f(1,555)= 60,101, p =<0,01) then the relationship between coping stress with self control also has a significant relationship (R= 0,366, f(5,150) = 78,544, p=<0,01). Similarly, between optimism and self control with coping stress also has a significant relationship (R= 0,892, f(2,155)= 289,581, p=<0,01).