Mathematics anxiety, Science process skills, and Physics performance of Grade 10 pupils

Abstract

This descriptive correlational study determined the relationship of mathematics anxiety, science process skills, and physics performance of Grade 10 students in an island school in Antique. Also, to find out what science process skills are employed by students in understanding physics concepts. The respondents of the study include 142 grade 10 students. The independent variables were mathematics anxiety and science process skills. The dependent variable was the physics performance of students. This research used the following instruments to gather data: Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale by Camarista (2012), a researcher-made Test on Science Process Skills, and another researcher-constructed Physics Performance Test validated by three experts in Physics and pilot-tested. Descriptive statistical tools were mean, standard deviation, and frequency while the inferential tool used was Pearson's r. Level of significance was set at 0.05 alpha. The study revealed that the participants have "high" level of mathematics anxiety, "poor" level of science process skills, and "below average" level of physics performance. It also revealed that all basic and integrated science process skills are employed by the students to understand physics concepts namely: observing, measuring, classifying, communicating, predicting, inferring, using numbers, using space/time relationship, questioning, controlling variables, formulating hypotheses, defining operationally, formulating models, designing experiment and interpreting data. However, the students who possess these science process skills are less than the target of the Department of Education, which is 75% of the students. The inferential analysis revealed that there is a significant negative correlation between mathematics anxiety and physics performance of students while science process skills have a strong significant positive correlation with physics performance. It further revealed that science process skills have no association with mathematics anxiety.