| Math Anxiety is an uncomfortable state when one meets mathematical situations,which has negative impact on individual’s academic performance. Math anxiety has been animportant issue since1972. But the researches basically based on variable-oriented analysistechniques, which usually ignored the individual differences of students with the same levelof math anxiety. Conversely, the person-oriented approach would give more details aboutthe characteristics of math anxiety students.This study is conducted among1513junior middle school students. Mathematicsself-efficacy, value beliefs, external goal-orientation, as well as cognitive and metacognitivestrategy, active help-seeking and passive help-seeking strategy were used as categoricalvariables for the latent profile analysis (LPA).It was found as follows:(1)Mathematics self-efficacy, value beliefs, external goal orientation, cognitive andmetacognitive strategy, active help-seeking and passive help-seeking strategy were effectiveindicators for latent class analysis.(2) Girls of Junior middle school had a higher math anxiety than boys, especially inpressure, worry, test anxiety and class anxiety.(3) There was no significant difference in the seventh grade and eighth grade students’math anxiety, except for mathematics class anxiety.(4) According to the results of latent profiles analysis, the characteristics of1404students can be divided into four categories. That is, refusing to learn, low-participation inclass, moderate learning participation and positive learner. Math anxiety students distributedin all four categories, and most of them are low–participation ones.(5) The latent profiles analysis results show that257high math anxiety students couldbe divided into three categories, namely negative learners, learners satisfied with the statusquo, and work-hard learners. |
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