Math fear of primary school second grade students: A sample of Diyarbakır province

The aim of this study is to explore the reasons of Math fear of primary school second grade students by considering various variables. Survey method is used in this study. From each central districts of Diyarbakır Province (Bağlar, Kayapınar, Sur, Yenişehir), one school was chosen randomly for the sample of the study. Chosen 490 secondary school students (258 female, 232 male) from these schools constitute the sampling of the research. A 30-item "Math Fear of Secondary School Students' scale, which was developed by Davarcıoğlu (2008), and a "Personal Data Form" consisting of 7 items were used as data collecting tools. The "Cronbach's alpha" reliability coefficient of the scale was determined as 0.920 by Davarcıoğlu. In the pre-application of the scale on 111 students chosen in Bağlar and Kayapınar districts, the "Cronbach's alpha" reliability coefficient was 0.887, while it was 0.927 in the actual application during research. During the examination of data collected with survey, percentage, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, independent sampling t-test, one way Anova were used. In the case of existence of significant differences in one-way Anova test, the results of Scheffé test was considered. The differences were expressed according to 0.05 meaningfulness level. "SPSS 16.0" package is used for these calculations.As a result of the research, it was determined that primary school second grade students' Math fear was low. It was also determined that there were statistically significant differences according to class levels, math grades, gender of math teacher, educational status of parents and monthly income of the family. However, no significant difference was found between the students' gender. Some suggestions were proposed related with results obtained from the research.Key words: Math, Fear, Math Fear, Primary School Second Grade