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The Unite!Seed project “Freshman Math anxiety evaluation” (FMAE) is funded by the European University Alliance Unite! Consisting of the partner universities:
FMAE is conducting a study to assess the state of math anxiety among freshman students within the Unite! network. FMAE consists of a network of math lecturers and researchers who try to improve math education. FMAE is led by social entrepreneurs and PhD students from the University of Technology Graz in Austria.
In the following, we will provide you with information about the aim of this study, benefits and risks associated with participation in this study as well as information about data usage and data protection. Therefore, before participating in the study, please read the following document carefully.
If you have any concerns or questions at any point before, during, or after participating in this study, do not hesitate to contact us at unite@edventure.studio
For your convenience, we also provide translations of this consent form into Catalan, English, Finish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
The purpose of this study is to gain insights into math anxiety among freshman students at technical universities while distinguishing between anxiety from learning math and anxiety from having a math exam.
In a second step, teaching actions will be designed to reduce anxiety from math and foster a more healthy learning environment.
This study is conducted by students and researchers for students. By providing us with information about your math anxiety level, we will be able to draw inferences that help us evidence and inform recommendations for cultural change in math education. Your efforts will help us to ensure adequate representation of your institution and country, and improve the odds that we will ultimately have enough data to formulate institution- and country-specific recommendations specific to your context and circumstances.
When designing the questionnaire we put effort into minimizing the collection of demographic and affiliation data thus making a re-identification almost impossible. We do not collect any personal data suited for identification and do not track any IPs or cookies. Only the timestamps of opening and submitting the questionnaire are stored.
We will not publicly release any individual data sets. Only aggregated evaluations with respect to university, gender, and field of study will be published if there are at least 10 individuals per category.
The study involves filling out an online survey that will take approximately 5 minutes. The survey starts with demographic questions such as your age and gender and affiliation regarding university and field of study.
The second/main part consists of questions regarding your anxiety level in different regular situations related to math education.
As we do not collect any personal contact data, no direct follow-up questionnaire is possible. If you are interested in the outcome of the survey (anxiety map) or if you actively want to participate in the investigation and improve math education in Europe contact us via unite@edventure.studio.
The study is conducted by researchers, lecturers and PhDs of the participating Unite! universities and edventure Studios GmbH (https://edventure.studio), a verified social enterprise dedicated to improving math education.
The study is part of the Unite!Seed project “Freshman math skills and anxiety evaluation” that focuses on bridging the gap in maths skills between high school alumni and first-year university students and tries to unite motivated math lecturers from all partner universities to share best practices in teaching mathematics.
The data will be collected and stored using encryption via the cloud service of LimeSurvey.org, stored on a server in Germany (subcontracted by the company Hetzner), and shared within the project team for evaluation and dissemination.
The institution responsible for coordinating this survey is edventure Studios GmbH. If you have any concerns or questions at any point before, during, or after participating in this study, do not hesitate to contact us at unite@edventure.studio.
Your participation in this research study is voluntary. You can withdraw from the study at any point without providing any reasons for doing so and without consequences. To withdraw from the study, simply do not continue to fill in the survey questionnaire. Your responses will be recorded up to the point where you stopped filling in the survey. Regarding further rights please see the section “Your Data Protection Rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)”.
Data collected in this study will be used for the following purposes:
At the end of the project (December 2024) the collected responses will be evaluated according to a standardized evaluation scheme to distinguish between learning math anxiety (LMA) and math evaluation anxiety (MEA) and congregated according to categories (the collected demographic and affiliation information, like age group, gender, university, field of study). To guarantee a high level of anonymization a category must consist of at least ten survey responses.
The such gained anxiety levels according to the chosen categories will be published.
The legal basis for the collection of the data is informed consent, as specified in Article 6(1a) of the GDPR. All terms relating to data protection are based on GDPR.
Your responses will be confidential. We do not collect any personal information making a reidentification almost impossible. Data is collected and stored with the software LimeSurvey on an encrypted server within Germany. For further details see https://help.limesurvey.org/portal/en/kb/faqs/data-protection-and-policy.
This study was evaluated by the Ethics Commission of Wrocław University of Science and Technology and approved with A POSITIVE OPINION on the compliance of the ethical and deontological aspects of the project of scientific research with human participation on 20th of May 2024.
Results derived from this study will be disseminated in a variety of ways:
If you want to be informed of any results derived from the survey follow the events within the Unite! Network or contact the project lead via: unite@edventure.studio
You have the right to obtain information about the personally identifiable information collected in this survey at any time, as well as the right to rectify or erase or restrict data processing. You have a right to revoke your consent to data processing as well as the right to data portability. To exercise your rights, please contact unite@edventure.studio.
Note that the survey does not directly collect unique identifiable personal information making a direct identification of a data entry unlikely. To exercise your right, you will need to provide us with metadata, such as the datetime start/end of your filling out the survey and/or the collection of entered data that makes your data entry possibly identifiable (e.g. if you are the only female student in a study field of a certain age).
The responsible authority regarding data protection is the edventure Studios GmbH, Elisabethstraße 85|W616, 8010 Graz, Austria. Email: unite@edventure.studio
The supervisory authority is the Austrian Data Protection Authority; Barichgasse 40-42, 1030 Wien; Phone: +43 1 52 152-0; E-Mail: dsb@dsb.gv.at
Complaints may be lodged with the supervisory authority via their online form.
Clicking on the "Agree" button indicates that:
If you do not wish to participate in the research study, please decline participation by NOT clicking the "Agree" button and NOT continuing to the survey.
