Research Outputs
Psychometric properties of the revised child mathematics anxiety questionnaire (CMAQ-R) for Spanish speaking children
Mathematics anxiety (MA) has primarily been studied in adults and children over 8 years of age in English-speaking countries. Few studies have examined MA in younger children and in Spanish-speaking contexts due to the lack of suitable instruments. In the present study we examine the psychometric properties of the Child Mathematics Anxiety Questionnaire (CMAQ-R), an instrument widely used in English-speaking primary school children. A total of 810 Chilean second-grade students (50% boys) from different school types (26% public, 11% private, 63% private-subsidised) completed a Spanish version of CMAQ-R. The results showed adequate internal consistency in line with the original instrument. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that scores from the CMAQ-R version best fit a two correlated-factor structure, which was invariant across gender and school type. This study offers evidence regarding the usefulness of the CMAQ-R in contexts culturally different to the original and supports the multidimensionality of MA.
Factors that bias teacher expectations: Findings from Chile
It is well-known that teacher expectations tend to be biased by factors such as student socio-economic status (SES) and gender. However, much less research has been devoted to understanding how teacher characteristics may impact their own expectations of the students. The present study investigated teacher expectations for 343 Chilean teachers (240 in-service and 103 pre-service). We first designed and validated an instrument to measure expectations; then we assessed the effect of teacher gender and experience, and student gender and school-SES in the formation of teacher expectations. The data were analysed using hypothesis and data-driven analyses. The results showed that SES had an effect on teacher expectations (2= .03 to .12); there was a higher probability that teachers from high-SES schools would have positive expectations of their students. However, negative expectations were equally distributed across teachers working in high and low-SES schools. There was also no evidence of the effect of teacher or student gender on teacher expectations. With respect to teacher experience, the findings were clear cut; both pre-service and in-service teachers shared identical expectations of their students. These findings have important implications regarding teacher training programmes since the expectation bias is observed very early during training.