To promote a positive attitude toward mathematics, which objective should be…

Concept: Educational objectives are grouped into three domains.

• Cognitive — knowing, understanding and reasoning.

• Psychomotor — doing, and skilled physical performance.

• Affective — feeling, valuing and choosing.

An attitude towards a school subject is an affective outcome, and Krathwohl's affective taxonomy orders that domain into five levels:

1. Receiving — the learner is willing to attend to the subject.

2. Responding — the learner participates in it and reacts to it.

3. Valuing — the learner attaches worth to it and begins to choose it.

4. Organising — the learner fits that value alongside their other values.

5. Characterisation by a value — the value becomes a settled part of how the learner acts.

Movement up this order depends on what the learner's repeated experience of the subject feels like. Objectives applied through external control do reach the affective domain, but the attitude they produce is tied to the control: it lasts only as long as the control lasts, and where the experience becomes anxious it moves the learner down this order rather than up. A durable positive attitude is built when the experience itself is satisfying enough that the learner responds without being made to.

NCERT's National Curriculum Framework states the same point for this subject: the central problem of elementary mathematics is fear and failure, and enjoyment of mathematics is set out as an explicit aim of the elementary stage.

Application: The stem asks which objective should be prioritised in elementary education in order to build a positive attitude. Fostering interest and enjoyment in mathematics learning is the objective that acts on the affective layer directly — games, stories, puzzles and concrete material make the child's encounter with number satisfying, so the child responds voluntarily, and repeated voluntary response is what turns responding into valuing.

• Emphasizing speed over understanding in tasks makes elapsed time the criterion. Drill under a clock is one of the best-documented sources of mathematics anxiety, so it works against the attitude the stem is asking about.

• Rewarding only correct answers immediately is extrinsic reinforcement of the product. Interest built this way lasts only as long as the reward, and a child whose method is sound but whose answer is wrong receives nothing.

• Using pressure to motivate mathematical performance is avoidance motivation. It can raise short-term output, but it ties mathematics to threat and predicts later avoidance of the subject.

Cross-check: Apply one test to each objective — does it make the child more likely to choose a mathematical task again tomorrow? Only fostering interest and enjoyment answers yes; speed pressure, answer-only rewards and performance pressure all act on today's output under external control. This is the same conclusion the National Curriculum Framework reaches when it names fear of mathematics, not weak computation, as the problem to be removed at the elementary stage.