The communication styles used by teachers in numerical lessons

Abstract

The grounding of this study comes from a pilot study done on 450 high school students. The interesting result is that 60% of the students, scoring low in examination anxiety, low in trait anxiety, scored high in mathematics anxiety (science anxiety was also asked). The most frequently stated checklist items of those students were communication problems with teachers. Relying on this finding, the main purpose of this study is to decrease the math/science anxiety through fostering teachers' communication styles. Under this main purpose, this study intends to include focus group meetings of experts (academic staff from education faculty of Istanbul Aydin University, high school administrators, math and science teachers practicing in Turkey and Europe. This study will help to increase numeric performance of the students and guide teachers to practice their communication skills through a guidebook. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.