RQ: Is there a significant relationship among 8th Grade Students’ Geometry Achievement, Geometry Self-Efficacy and Spatial Anxiety?

          Geometry occupies a crucial place in mathematics curriculum because it provides students to improve deductive structure by combining the theories of mathematics with real life situations (Hvizdo,1992). The main goal of geometry course was stated as to improve students’ spatial sense by giving various representations in teaching the relations and three dimensional shapes (Gaulin,1985).

Although the teachers make great effort to teach geometry, based on the results of numerous studies, the students do not learn geometry as much as they need or they are expected (Clements&Battista,1992). In Turkey the situation is same. According to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study results, in which the science and mathematics achievement of 8^th grade students of 38 countries were measured, Turkish students obtained the lowest mean scores in geometry content area (Duatepe,2004).

Many researchers claimed that spatial ability, the ability to generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images (Lohman,1993), has an important role in understanding geometry (Unal,Jakubowski,&Corey,2009). According to Wheatley (1990) spatial sense includes various abilities such as drawing tables, graphs and diagrams, looking for patterns so it has a great importance in geometry teaching and learning. However, spatial anxiety, “anxiety about environmental navigation” (Lawton,1994,p.767), cannot be ignored when spatial sense is under consideration. In the literature there were studies investigating the relationship between the components of spatial ability and spatial anxiety (Hund & Minarik,2006; Lawton,1994, Dursun,2010). For instance, in Dursun (2010)’s study, a negative significant relationship between spatial visualization ability and spatial anxiety of preservice teachers was revealed. Similarly, Hund and Minarik (2006) found that spatial anxiety had a negative relationship with navigation performance. Furthermore, Lawton (1994) asserted that orientation strategy which is “maintaining a sense of their own position in relation to environmental reference points” (p.767) had a negative relationship with spatial anxiety. Based on the results of these studies it can be convenient to say that having a strong positive relationship with spatial ability (Bulut&Koroğlu,2000), geometry achievement might be negatively related to spatial anxiety. Thus,  spatial anxiety is one of the concerns of this study

The other variable to be examined is geometry self-efficacy which refers to “beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required in order to produce given attainments” (Bandura,1977,p. 3). Bandura (1977) claimed that self-efficacy beliefs determine whether an individual will attend the task and the amount of effort the individual will perform in case of interferences. In most of the studies, self-efficacy was used to explain the reason for the performance variety between people who have similar knowledge and abilities (Pajares&Miller,1995). Since self-efficacy and anxiety affects achievement, investigating the relationship of these three variables for geometry will be beneficial and meaningful for educators and teachers.

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