Abstract—Although mathematics is one of the essential
courses for students in determining college majors, for many
students in postsecondary education, mathematics is seen more
as a frightening ordeal than a valuable learning experience.
Computer science students explicitly use mathematics in many
computer science courses. This demands that computer science
majors have in-depth math background to become successful
in a computer science career. This paper is a report of the
initial development of a new instrument to measure computer
science students’ attitudes towards mathematics. The
reliability coefficient, Cronbach alpha value, for the
instrument in our study is found to be 0.811 and coefficients
for four subscales are ranged from 0.812 to 0.915. These values
seem to be very promising for this study.
Index Terms—Cronbach coefficients, enjoyment of math,
math anxiety, math attitude, math relevancy, self-efficacy,
survey instrument
The authors are with Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, USA
(e-mail: pali@iup.edu, sanwar@iup.edu, farag@iup.edu).
Cite: Parveen J. Ali, Sanwar Ali, and Waleed E. Farag, "An Instrument to Measure Math Attitudes of Computer Science Students," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 459-462, 2014.