Mathematics: an Academic Discipline that Generate Anxiety in College Students

Mathematics is very important in the workplace. Companies, through mathematical models, can filter and interpret the data obtained from sales reports, customer feedback or web traffic, in order to improve the company's strategy and optimize processes and results. However, a problem arises: for the students who will soon enter the work force, mathematics generates anxiety and so, they try to avoid it. This study aims to examine whether there is a difference in university students regarding math anxiety in terms of gender, career, age and semester, as well as the causes of this anxiety. It is a study that is approached from the hypothetical-deductive and cross-sectional method. The sampling was simple random and it was made up by 343 college students from the majors of the administrative economic area. The instrument used is the scale designed by Auzmendi (1992), of which only the anxiety factor was used. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that anxiety towards mathematics is the same in men and women, there are no differences in relation to the age and major of the students, but there is a difference regarding the course that the student attends.