Development of the Revised form of the Coping with Mathematics Scale

This study was conducted for the purpose of revising and improving the Coping with Mathematics Scale developed to evaluate the coping strategies of individuals when faced with difficulties in mathematics. The adopted theoretical framework was the adolescent coping model of Frydenberg and Lewis (1993). Initially 36 items had been generated by adaptation of items from Frydenberg and Lewis’ Adolescent Coping Scale for contexts of dealing with mathematics. The first study for the development of the scale was conducted with 751 students preparing to take the university entrance examination in Turkey. The final form of the scale in the initial study comprised 36 items in three sub categories: 13 items in coping focused on solving the problem, 13 items in non-productive coping and 10 items in coping with reference to others (Ader, 2004). Data on the revised short form of the scale with 18 items that were collected from 174 adolescents were analyzed in the present study. The results indicated satisfactory psychometric characteristics for the revised short form of theCoping with Mathematics Scale