Update on Attitudes and Other Affective Variables in Learning Mathematics

Several years ago, a comprehensive review of research on attitudes toward mathematics covering the decade of the 1960's was published (Aiken, 1970). During the five years since that review was written, more dissertations and articles pertaining to this topic have appeared than in the entire preceding ten years. Because many of these investigations point to interesting new research directions, it seemed important to update the earlier review at this time rather than waiting until the decade of the 1970's has passed. Regardless of the efforts of this writer and others to bring to the educational research community periodic reviews of studies concerned with attitudes and anxiety toward mathematics, many investigators in this area continue to be unaware or unappreciative of previous research on the topic. For example, one recent paper discusses the topic of "mathophobia" as if nothing had been written about its development and measurement (Lazarus, 1974). This oversight is almost certainly due to a failure to search the relevant literature, the first step in any scientific inquiry.