Examining primary and secondary school mathematics teachers' anxiety in teaching mathematics and their students' mathematics anxiety in terms of some variables

Being a compulsory course for students at all levels of the education in Turkey, mathematics is a popular subject for some students whereas it is feared by others, which leads them to anxiety later. This fact led researchers to conduct studies on mathematics anxiety. It is clearly seen that the studies conducted for this purpose have put emphasis on teacher and student variables. However, there is no study in which the mathematics anxiety experienced by students during their transition from primary school to secondary school were examined together with the teacher variable. The aim of this study is to examine the anxiety experienced by primary and secondary school mathematics teachers in mathematics teaching together with the anxiety experienced by 4th and 5th grade students in mathematics learning. The subject was handled in terms of various variables and some recommendations were developed in accordance with the results gathered. The population of the research consists of 3744 students, studying at private/state primary and secondary schools of Ministry of National Education in Soma province of Manisa in 2017-2018 academic year along with 79 primary school teachers and 38 secondary school mathematics teachers. The sample of the study is represented by 1096 students and 60 teachers which contains primary school and secondary school mathematics teachers evenly. They were selected randomly from the research population. The data collected from the study was analyzed in SPSS package program and non-parametric statistical techniques were used. The data collection tools used during the research were "The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale for Primary School Students" developed by Bindak (2005), "The Mathematics Teaching Anxiety Scale" developed by Peker (2006) and "Personal Information Form" applied to both the teachers and the students. According to the results of the study, mathematics anxiety of 4th and 5th grade students (For 4th grade students X ̅=1.69, for 5th grade students X ̅=1.98; mathematics anxiety scores increases from 1.00 to 5.00.) is at the level of "never". The results suggest that there is a significant increase in the level of anxiety from 4th grade to 5th grade. Besides it is observed that the level of anxiety does not differ significantly depending on the student's gender or residance (city center or village). The anxiety experienced by primary school and secondary school mathematics teachers in teaching mathematics (For primary school teacher X ̅=1.92 and for secondary school mathematics teacher X ̅=1.67; mathematics anxiety scores increases from 1.00 to 5.00) is at the level of "strongly disagree". And the level of the anxiety does not differ significantly between these two types of teachers. Moreover no differences were seen depending on the teachers's gender, the type of the school they graduated, seniority in their jobs and the location of the school they work at. Key words: Mathematics Anxiety, Primary School, Secondary School Mathematics Teaching