Variable selection via the adaptive elastic net: mathematics success of the students in Singapore and Turkey

The quality of education is crucial for its competitiveness in the developing world. International tests are organized at regular intervals to measure the quality of education and to see the place in the ranking of countries. The surveys on these examinations have provided a large number of variables that can be effective on the scores of the tests, including family, teacher, school and course equipment and information communication technologies, etc. The important question is which variables are relevant for the students' achievement in these tests. We investigated the barriers of mathematics success of Turkish students in the TIMSS exam and compared their status with Singaporean students who took part in at top of the ranking in the exam. For this, we employed the adaptive elastic net which is one of the regularized regression methods to dataset and compared their prediction accuracy according to three different alpha levels [0.1; 0.5; 0.9] to determine the model that has high variable selection ability with optimal prediction. The adaptive elastic net with the alpha level [0.9] was selected as superior to others. As the findings, a technology-oriented education system can help to success of the students in Turkey and the countries having similar experiences in international tests.

The Effect of Mathematics Class Commitment and Anxiety on Mathematics Success: A Path Analysis Study

The concepts of commitment and anxiety are essential components of the teaching process, and these concepts come across as the commitment to and concern of mathematics in the field of mathematics learning. This study aims to explore the effect of secondary school students’ mathematics class commitment and anxiety on mathematics success. Another subject studied is the direct and indirect effects of the mathematics class commitment and anxiety on mathematics success. The study is of the quantitative method and follows the survey method. The research was carried out with 488 pupils (257 female and 231 male), selected with simple random sampling, studying in a secondary school in a province in the Turkey’s Eastern Anatolia Region. “Personal Information Form”, “Student Engagement in Mathematics Scale” and “Mathematics Anxiety-Apprehension Scale” was applied to the secondary school students as data collection tools. Significant relationships and effects have been identified between the secondary school students’ mathematics class commitment and anxiety and their mathematics success. In addition, the direct and indirect effects of mathematics class commitment on success and anxiety in mathematics have also been calculated.