DISCUSSION

The matter of using a standardized examination or test to assess one’s knowledge or performance level in any area is well established in psychological and educational research. It fact, Lindsley et al. [36] noted that examinations are used as a method of assessment of students’ skills, knowledge and competence [37]. Therefore, low rates of success on tests speak to knowledge deficiency in the content area. As such, this study employs success rates in CSEC Mathematics to proxy secondary level students’ knowledge level or lack of as this would allow for an understanding of whether the skills, knowledge and competencies have been mastered or otherwise by secondary students.  From such a vantage point, the success or failure rates in CSEC Mathematics offer great insights into students’ attitude, affective and cognitive domains. According to the Ministry of Education:

Mathematics continues to be an important component in the formation of the educated person and as such, mathematics education should reflect the goals of education in a dynamic society. We must therefore address not only the acquisition of skills and mastery of ideas. We must address more than the accumulation of facts and principles. Mathematics education in the age of information must place emphasis on the higher skills of discussion, interpreting and evaluation [38].

It can be deduced from the expressions of the Ministry of Education that there are some challenges among Jamaican students in the area of mathematics, which is also argued by Hill [39], Sinclair [40] and Benjamin [41]. With mathematics being important in an individual’s life as well as for the society [40,42-46], the underperformance of pupils in this subject is therefore of paramount significance to human development. In an article entitled ‘Math’s Big Problem’, Benjamin [41] opined that Jamaican students at the grade four level are under-performing in mathematics, with less than 55% of them mastering the principles and procedures in the discipline. The low performance of Jamaican children at the primary level in mathematics is, therefore, of concern as these accounts for the underperformance at the secondary level.

Over the last three decades (i.e., 1989-2017), particularly the last decade (i.e., 2007-2017), there has been much discussion surrounding the issue of the quality of education in Jamaica [19,22,47-52], particularly the underperformance of secondary students in the discipline of Mathematics [53-55]. As a result of this discourse, there have been many calls for transforming the existing educational practices and principles in Jamaica, which includes re-vamping the teaching-learning process. The monitoring of students’ learning is encapsulated in formative assessment and this has been a focus of many interventions and/or studies to address the underperformance in many courses including mathematics [56]. There is even a call from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information for Jamaicans to embrace mathematics because of the importance of the discipline and people’s inability to apply the subject or people’s fear of the subject [57]. Jamaicans’ fear of mathematics and their underperformance in the area is aptly captured in a statement made by the Minister of Education, Mr. Reid [50] that: “Steps are being taken by the Ministry to improve the performance of students in mathematics by, among other things, increasing the number of teachers qualified in the subject” [57,58]. Despite all the efforts of the Ministry of Education and scholars in the area of mathematics, in 2017, 58% of Jamaican candidates who wrote the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate in mathematics were unsuccessful, which represented a mild decline from 59% over the previous year (Annex 1). A question of importance in the underperformance of secondary students in Jamaica is “What next can we try to reduce the fear for the subject matter?”

To understand the extent of crime in a violent community, the words of Professor Harriott are fitting and insightful, and this one reads, “The effect of the fear of criminal victimization usually extends beyond altering the psychological states of individuals to influencing behavioural patterns” [17]. Harriott’s perspective admits the psychological cost of homicide of residents of violent neighbourhoods and forwarded that the event of crime changes general behaviour. The issue is that crime produces fear, and fear of criminal victimization has multidimensional effect on humans. Fear is a factor in the discourse of underperformance in mathematics in Jamaica and this can be deduced from the Mr. Reid’s [50] statement that “Maths is important, and we as a people should not be afraid of mathematics. We must conquer it. We must make it fun and be able to apply it to some of the problems in our own personal lives and in the general society,” he said” [57]. The issue of fear is an emotion that is retarding people’s ability to successfully perform in mathematics. But, is fear of crime a factor that has been brought into the discourse? The fear of crime has been extensively studied in criminology [24,25,59], but its influence on mathematics performance is sparse in the literature. In Jamaica, there is evidence that much needs to be done as it relates to improving students’ performance in mathematics, which is the rationale for this study. With the low success rate in mathematics, many students do not have the prerequisite skills for perusing tertiary level education, and if they do, they are unable to register for programmes that require mathematics. Outside of this reality, is there a psychology to intentional homicide that is retarding mathematics performance that has never been empirically investigated prior to now?

Fear is an emotion that has been empirically established as influencing human’s psychobiological behaviour [28,29,31,60]. James-Lange theory of emotion has offered that humans and animals experience different events and that peoples’ nervous system explains their physical reactions to the situation. With this theorizing, one’s nervous system accounts for the physiological changes in the body such as increased heart rate, trembling, and upset stomach, and this could account for retarding brain activities in human functioning. When fear evolves in humans or animals, it changes the psychological function of the organism and slower the cognitive response of the person or animal. Professor Harriott has empirically established that fear is an emotion that influences psychobiological conditions and accounts for people’s unwillingness to share information with the police [24].

With Cannon-Bard's theorizing that emotions can be experienced and the human body may not necessarily see a physiological reaction, it means that people who experience fear from homicide may not be showing physiological signs such as trembling and hand sweating, and if they do, these would not have been empirically examined before students write CSEC Mathematics. The current study has shown an inverse statistical correlation between intentional homicide and success rate in CSEC Mathematics from which we will theorize how the event of intentional homicide is retarding cognitive functioning of students, and this envelops a new approach in health and educational research. From the literature on emotion, we are theorizing that intentional homicide slows cognitive skills that are critical to the discipline of mathematics, and as such students who live in violence prone areas should be assessed for bodily changes such as increased heart rate change, change in rhythm and other physiological changes following upsurge of violence, especially homicide, and this could be signs of their inability to apply themselves effectively to successfully write mathematics examinations.

Intentional homicide is simply not a physical event; it has a psychobiological component that must be considered in the study of education as it influences students’ performance in school, particularly retarding cognitive functioning that is required to successfully solve mathematical questions. There is a cost of intentional homicide that must be brought into the discourse of academic performance, especially mathematics that has alluded to substandard performance of students in mathematics. There is a psychology of intentional homicide that is undergirded in this research and one that has evolved as an explanation for the dismally low performance in mathematics in Jamaica. With there being evidence that fear is associated with criminal victimization [24,59] and that fear is an emotional response to perceived threat, it is also producing changes in brain function of people that is accounting for their inability to critically apply higher cognitive skills (i.e., interpretation, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) that are needed to successfully understand mathematics. With a group of scholars postulating that “learning mathematics has become a necessity for an individual's full development in today's complex society” [61], this means that intentional homicide is destroying the future development of the society.

There is a psychology of homicide that must be brought into the discourse of education. Studies found that a significant statistical correlation existed between homicide and visitation to psychiatric hospitals [13,62-64], which means that intentional murders affect the psychological well-being of people. Witnessing intentional homicide is an event that is accounting for fear among Jamaicans. The anxiety that is associated with violence, particularly intentional homicide, is similar to that of a trauma and produces the same psychobiological reaction as fear. The reality is, students who are living in fear because of violence may be psychologically paralyzed and they may become hopeless, depressed and unable to apply the high level cognitive skills that are needed to problem-solve mathematical questions in CSEC Mathematics. The cost of intentional homicide is not noticed by those therein and so students from violent prove areas who write the mathematics examination are not cognizant that they are affected until the failing grade issued by the examination body. Professor McLymont [65] indicated that:

The Jamaican education system is still failing to prepare and qualify many of the nation's youth for higher educational pursuits or for the workforce. It is speculated that this is because of the predominant use of the traditional direct teaching methodology in the classrooms [66].

From McLymont’s [65,66] perspective, the challenge of the underperformance of students is with the teaching methodology that is employed in the classroom; but this study showed that almost 25% of the performance in mathematics can be accounted for by homicide rates. This study is not refuting the vantage point purporting by Professor McLymont [65,66]; but it is adding a new dimension to the discourse, the psychology of homicide. As such, it is easy to support a cognitive approach to teaching mathematics because it empowers the teacher as well as the students [67]. In fact, according to McLymont [65], “Cognitive coaching as a vehicle for teacher empowerment and professional enhancement will provide more opportunities for teachers to be more reflective, while being assisted by one who is considered a coaching partner or a critical friend” (p. 21), but still will not be able to correct the emotional reactions from the challenge of intentional homicide.

Based on Costa and Garmston [68], cognitive coaching is a non-judgmental, developmental, reflective model that is blended with psychological orientations of cognitive theorists and the interpersonal bonding of humanists and offers a basis for understanding how student learning can be achieved by way of using cognitive development by Piaget and Vygotsky. With this perspective as well as those of this study, the researchers are recommending that the psychology of homicide must be included in cognitive coaching in the teaching of mathematics. This is a part of the solution in addressing the underperformance of mathematics among Jamaican candidates, as cognitive coaching needs to include the value of intentional homicide in the psychology of teaching of mathematics. Gitaari et al. [69] have identified factors accounting for poor academic performance in mathematics, which include attitude, practice, class attendance, teaching strategies, instructional materials, qualification and experience of teacher, family background, and school environment, and this study is adding psychology of intentional homicide.

In fact, McLeod [70] in his article entitled “Research on Affect in Mathematics Education: A Reconceptualization” advocated three kinds of affect which will have an impact on the learning of mathematics; namely beliefs, attitudes, and emotions, which expand the challenges of the teaching-learning process in mathematics. This research concurs with McLeod’s [70] work that sees intentional homicide as an event that arouses emotion, and this arousal is stimulus encoded in the nervous system, and therefore retards the development of critical cognitive skills that are needed to learn mathematics. Domjan [71] postulated that memory failure may occur owing to interference, which would have resulted from the exposure to stimuli or events. This goes to the core of the challenges of students in learning mathematics as their exposure to violence may be interfere with proactive memory, which can explain the performance deficiencies. Scientists opined some explanations for the performance deficiency in a subject area. Hence, the “negative attitudes towards mathematics can be considered a serious problem in mathematics education”, as the matter goes to the cognitive domain and not merely the social aspect including mortality.

By way of meta-analysis, Ma [72] found that anxiety in mathematics has a negative influence on achievement and this speaks to the psychology of an event or stimulus account for changes in learning outcomes. The psychology of intentional homicide is creating additional arousal and anxiety for mathematics making it increasingly difficult for students to learn the complex and abstract algorithms in mathematics. Hence, the performance deficiency in mathematics is a deep matter relating to the attitude of the students towards the subject that is cultured by other people who do not know about the challenge of the subject. This accounts for both some teachers and students avoiding mathematics, as found by Lester [27], because of the belief that is it a difficult subject. On the other hand, Schoenfeld [73] opined that the development of understanding mathematical concepts are associated with students’ belief in the subject [72,74-76], which we are proposing is complicated by the psychology of attitude and the influence of the event of intentional homicide on the nervous system. The event of homicide makes it increasingly difficult to understand how arousal and emotions following exposure to crime affect students’ attitude to the subject by way of the psychobiology and the inclusion of social biases. In addition, Ma and Kishor’s work [74]; using meta-analysis, found a direct relationship between attitude toward mathematics and achievement, which denotes that one’s mental state influences behaviour including avoidance to learn the subject.  

Another aspect of this work that must be equally argued like the psychological characteristics is the social marginalization of selected people in the society. The extent of the homicide problem in Jamaica is now referred to as a pandemic by a group of Jamaican scholars [77], which speaks to a social-coverage of a matter with multidimensional components. If homicide is classified as a public health concern in Jamaica by Bourne et al. [77], then this is a problem that extends beyond the field of criminology and/or education. The homicide pandemic is a psychobiological matter that has a particular social context, and as such must be addressed in this multidimensional manner. According to Harriott [16], ‘The communities of the marginalized urban inner city poor are most affected by this murderous violence’ (p. 242), which means that the cost of homicide in Jamaica is more a matter of poor urban people. From this perspective, it can be extrapolated that urban poor children in Jamaica are underperforming their more middle-to-affluent students in mathematics simply because of the disparity in exposure to violence, especially murders. Such a social fact means that the society is losing many children to continued social marginalization including psychoeconomic deprivation. There is much to the discourse of economic deprivation that is being experienced by poor people, particularly urban young males and so are violence and more so murder. With Harriott [16] postulating that intentional homicide is a young urban poor male phenomenon in the Jamaica, it follows that the fear of crime and criminal victimization is a cultured reality for many people who reside in urban slums. Another psychological reality that is the lived experience for those in urban slum is what Harriott [15-17] explains: “They therefore regard themselves as having little hope of integration into the shrinking formal economy and increasingly competitive labour market” (p. 249), which speaks to not only economic marginalization of those residing in the community; but it also means psychological deprivation that influences attitude including the reluctance to apply themselves in problem solving of complex mathematical concepts. The extent of the psychological neglect of those in urban slums is embedded in what is said here: “The neglect of the police who may be frustrated by the interminable inner-city violence tends to foster self-help among the citizens of these areas” (p. 249). Undoubtedly if those are the realities of people in urban slums, then, their lived experience is one of perpetual psychological trauma so that their preoccupation with survival ability, peace and comfort that solving mathematical principles and understanding mathematical procedures is low on the list of these people. In fact, with the gravity of the violence undercurrent to which urban poor people are continuously exposed, it makes it increasingly difficult for them to learn mathematical concepts/principles that require concentration and a high degree of cognitive skills. Those violent communities that are homes for people in urban slums are difficult to escape from. These are psychological maze for urban slum residents and a milieu that is difficult to change for people who are desirous of providing their children with home environments that are conducive to studying difficult subjects like mathematics and the sciences. 

Campbell and Wu [78] said that the home environment and family processes provide a network of physical, social and intellectual forces and factors which affect the students’ learning. According to them, the family’s level of encouragement, expectations, and educational activities in the home are related to socioeconomic status, which means that families from different socio-economic groups create different learning environments that affect the child’s academic achievement. The matter of the underperformance of those in poor urban violence prone communities is enlarged by outside environment in the homes are that cannot be controlled by the marginalized families. The crime pandemic is pervasive in Jamaica and poor urban slum resident cannot change their homes in which they live and must raise children. The matter is serious beyond urban slum as Harriott [17] found that 2 in every 5 Jamaicans fear the risk of criminality, and this must be worse among the residents of the violent communities. Children who reside in violent urban slum communities are exposed to and experience continued barriers to complete assignment and master complex mathematics principles compared to those who reside in middle-to-affluent neighbourhoods. Because children of urban slum cannot stop the violence, create a different community of live in or use a magic wand to create a conducive milieu of studying, the event of intentional homicide is accounting for the cognitive deprivation that is expressed in the low performance in mathematics at the CSEC level.

CONCLUSION

The importance of this study is critical to understanding the challenges of Jamaican students’ inability to successful write mathematics at the secondary level. The reality is, the crime pandemic that is on-going in the society is destroying students’ cognitive domain and this accounts for their underperformance in the area of mathematics. The seriousness of the mathematics underperformance in Jamaica is more than as outlined by the success rate of the students as in 2013, 43.3% of those who wrote the CSEC Mathematics examination were success; but the Ministry of Education stated that “With less than 20% of a given secondary cohort leaving the formal education system with mathematics qualifications, there is a small percentage of the population able to access the opportunities which are and will become available in the coming years” [53,79]. Such a claim means that the psychology of homicide is having an even more detrimental negative influence on students’ cognition than that found by this study. As such, the need to begin a health, psychological, educational and social campaign in Jamaica is critical to the arresting of the psychobiological influence of homicide of cognitive domain of students. Therefore, we are proposing that the social environment in Jamaica is destroying the cognitive domain of its people and as such a more scientific investigation on the role of homicide on performance is needed in an effort to address the continued underperformance of students.

Learning is a cognitive activity, which, if influenced by negative events like intentional homicide becomes an arousal and this feeds into emotion that will affect the psychobiological state of student. The negative correlation between intentional homicide and mathematics success at the secondary level is an indication that the event, intentional homicide, is destroying the abstract development of children and this is evident in failure rate in mathematics. The fact is, mathematics that is an abstract science requires the cognitive development of infants into abstractions and if this is not developed, then students will experience difficulty in later life when they are required to utilize abstractions. We are proposing that negative association between intentional homicide and mathematics success rate at the secondary level is a clear indication that exposure to intentional homicide is retarding the development of abstractions in people and this accounts for their challenge in performing at a high level in mathematics. The current findings allow a deduction that the event homicide is destroying the formal operation stage of children’s development and these accounts for their challenge in mastering mathematics, which demands a high degree of abstraction.