Middle school students' mathematical problem-solving ability and the influencing factors in mainland China

Zhuzhu Xu; Chunxia Qi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1042315

Middle school students' mathematical problem-solving ability and the influencing factors in mainland China

Front Psychol. 2022 Nov 11:13:1042315. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1042315. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Zhuzhu Xu¹, Chunxia Qi²

Affiliations

¹ School of Education, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China.
² Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

Abstract

This study investigated the mathematical problem-solving ability of 42,644 ninth-grade students who participated in regional education quality health monitoring from Z province in East China and the factors which influence their performance of mathematical problem-solving. The results are as follows: (1) ~96% of the students' mathematics problem-solving ability meets the basic academic requirements of the mathematics curriculum standards; (2) boys and children without siblings performed better, and urban students performed significantly better than county and rural students; (3) ~28% of students' mathematical problem-solving performance came from inter-school variability; urban and rural backgrounds had a greater impact on mathematical problem-solving than did teaching factors, while teaching self-efficacy had the least impact among the school-level influencing factors. In contrast, the influence of individual non-intelligence factors was higher than that of student background variables, including a greater positive effect of self-efficacy and a greater negative effect of mathematics anxiety.

Keywords: benchmark; influencing factors; mainland China; mathematical problem-solving; middle school mathematics; proficiency.