A CAVE Survey for Measuring Mathematics Attitudes Based on the Characteristics of Students in Mainland China

As mathematics is the foundation for pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors, investigating the assessment of attitudes toward mathematics is essential for promoting the development of the STEM field. However, the work focusing on developing a survey of attitudes toward mathematics is limited in mainland China. This study built a theoretical construct of students' attitudes toward mathematics based on the characteristics of the educational system in mainland China. A survey researchers could use to measure mainland Chinese students' attitudes toward mathematics was created and developed according to the proposed theoretical construct. The target survey was validated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on 700 and 778 high school students from mainland China, respectively. Furthermore, the relationship between math attitudes and performance was used to check the construct of the developed survey. The finalized survey includes four scales: confidence (i.e., α = 0.90 with 10 items), anxiety (i.e., α = 0.90 with 10 items), value (i.e., α = 0.70 with 6 items), and enjoyment (i.e., α = 0.71 with 8 items). The overall results show that the survey is reliable and valid to measure secondary students' attitudes toward mathematics, and thus suggest future studies about measuring Chinese secondary students' attitudes towards mathematics by employing this survey. This study might draw the attention of researchers to investigate attitudes toward mathematics while exploring their affective and cognitive outcomes related to mathematics.