A Study of Math Anxiety/Math Avoidance in Preservice Elementary Teachers

In her 1972 study, Lucy Sells (1978) indicated that 92 percent of the female first-year students in the University of California had such inadequate mathematics preparation that they had effectively closed the door on 70 percent of the career choice available to them. Sell's conclusions and subsequent research on math avoidance were the bases for the resarch we conducted during the 1980-1981 school year at the University of Minnesota, Morris a liberal art college with an enrollment of 1700. This study was directed at documenting math avoidance among female students on the campus.