Increasing Retention in Mathematics Courses: The role of self-confidence in Mathematics on Academic Performance

Adriana Espinosa (), Aleksandr Tikhonov () and Jay Jorgenson ()
Additional contact information
Adriana Espinosa: The City College of New York
Aleksandr Tikhonov: The City College of New York
Jay Jorgenson: The City College of New York

No 3305468, Proceedings of International Academic Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences

Abstract: Underachievement rates in mathematics for the United States have been alarming for a long time. While the reasons have been studied at length, a large area pays close attention to self-confidence as predictor of academic performance. Most research on this area however, is based on high school students. This study extends this line of work by assessing self-confidence and its effect on academic performance among college students. Using quantile regression we show that self-confidence positively impacts class performance for the middle and bottom quantiles, but not the top 75th percent. These results imply that simple and costless confidence boosting exercises conducted in the classroom may have a positive impact on at risk students, and consequently retention. The results appear to be generalizable, rather than localized to summer school students.

Keywords: Retention; self-confidence; mathematics; Fennema-Sherman; academic performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 21st International Academic Conference, Miami, Mar 2016, pages 34-46

Downloads: (external link)
https://iises.net/proceedings/21st-international-a ... =33&iid=010&rid=5468 First version, 2016

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sek:iacpro:3305468

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of International Academic Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klara Cermakova ().