Two laboratory and two randomized field experiments tested a psychological intervention designed to improve students' scores on high-stakes exams and to increase our understanding of why ...pressure-filled exam situations undermine some students' performance. We expected that sitting for an important exam leads to worries about the situation and its consequences that undermine test performance. We tested whether having students write down their thoughts about an upcoming test could improve test performance. The intervention, a brief expressive writing assignment that occurred immediately before taking an important test, significantly improved students' exam scores, especially for students habitually anxious about test taking. Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores.
Math can be difficult, and for those with high levels of mathematics-anxiety (HMAs), math is associated with tension, apprehension, and fear. But what underlies the feelings of dread effected by math ...anxiety? Are HMAs' feelings about math merely psychological epiphenomena, or is their anxiety grounded in simulation of a concrete, visceral sensation - such as pain - about which they have every right to feel anxious? We show that, when anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher one's math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself (bilateral dorso-posterior insula). Interestingly, this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts; rather, the anticipation of math is painful. Our data suggest that pain network activation underlies the intuition that simply anticipating a dreaded event can feel painful. These results may also provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why HMAs tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias HMAs away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Math Performance in Stressful Situations Beilock, Sian L.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
10/2008, Letnik:
17, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Whether because individuals are made aware of negative stereotypes about how they should perform or are in a high-stakes testing situation, a stressful environment can adversely affect the success ...people have in solving math problems. I review work examining how unwanted failure in math occurs and individual differences in those most likely to fail. This work suggests that a high-stress situation creates worries about the situation and its consequences that compete for the working memory (WM) normally available for performance. Consequently, the performance of individuals who rely most heavily on WM for successful execution (i.e., higher-WM individuals) is most likely to decline when the pressure is on.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Recent research has shown that people's actions can influence how they think. A separate body of research has shown that the gestures people produce when they speak can also influence how they think. ...In this article, we bring these two literatures together to explore whether gesture has an effect on thinking by virtue of its ability to reflect real-world actions. We first argue that gestures contain detailed perceptual-motor information about the actions they represent, information often not found in the speech that accompanies the gestures. We then show that the action features in gesture do not just reflect the gesturer's thinking— they can feed back and alter that thinking. Gesture actively brings action into a speaker's mental representations, and those mental representations then affect behavior— at times more powerfully than do the actions on which the gestures are based. Gesture thus has the potential to serve as a unique bridge between action and abstract thought.
The Role of Expressive Writing in Math Anxiety Park, Daeun; Ramirez, Gerardo; Beilock, Sian L.
Journal of experimental psychology. Applied,
06/2014, Letnik:
20, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Math anxiety is a negative affective reaction to situations involving math. Previous work demonstrates that math anxiety can negatively impact math problem solving by creating performance-related ...worries that disrupt the working memory needed for the task at hand. By leveraging knowledge about the mechanism underlying the math anxiety-performance relationship, we tested the effectiveness of a short expressive writing intervention that has been shown to reduce intrusive thoughts and improve working memory availability. Students (N = 80) varying in math anxiety were asked to sit quietly (control group) prior to completing difficulty-matched math and word problems or to write about their thoughts and feelings regarding the exam they were about to take (expressive writing group). For the control group, high math-anxious individuals (HMAs) performed significantly worse on the math problems than low math-anxious students (LMAs). In the expressive writing group, however, this difference in math performance across HMAs and LMAs was significantly reduced. Among HMAs, the use of words related to anxiety, cause, and insight in their writing was positively related to math performance. Expressive writing boosts the performance of anxious students in math-testing situations.
Three laboratory experiments involving students' behavior and brain imaging and one randomized field experiment in a college physics class explored the importance of physical experience in science ...learning. We reasoned that students' understanding of science concepts such as torque and angular momentum is aided by activation of sensorimotor brain systems that add kinetic detail and meaning to students' thinking. We tested whether physical experience with angular momentum increases involvement of sensorimotor brain systems during students' subsequent reasoning and whether this involvement aids their understanding. The physical experience, a brief exposure to forces associated with angular momentum, significantly improved quiz scores. Moreover, improved performance was explained by activation of sensorimotor brain regions when students later reasoned about angular momentum. This finding specifies a mechanism underlying the value of physical experience in science education and leads the way for classroom practices in which experience with the physical world is an integral part of learning.
People's fear and anxiety about doing math--over and above actual math ability--can be an impediment to their math achievement. We show that when the math-anxious individuals are female elementary ...school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that these female teachers' anxieties relate to girls' math achievement via girls' beliefs about who is good at math. First- and second-grade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The math achievement of the students in these teachers' classrooms was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher's math anxiety and her students' math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year's end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that "boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading" and the lower these girls' math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers' math anxiety carries consequences for girls' math achievement by influencing girls' beliefs about who is good at math.
Girls tend to have more negative math attitudes, including gender stereotypes, anxieties, and self-concepts, than boys. These attitudes play a critical role in math performance, math course-taking, ...and the pursuit of math-related career paths. We review existing research, primarily from U.S. samples, showing that parents’ and teachers’ expectancies for children’s math competence are often gender-biased and can influence children’s math attitudes and performance. We then propose three new directions for future research on the social transmission of gender-related math attitudes. First, parents’ and teachers’ own math anxieties and their beliefs about whether math ability is a stable trait may prove to be significant influences on children’s math attitudes. Second, a developmental perspective that investigates math attitudes at younger ages and in relation to other aspects of gender development, such as gender rigidity, may yield new insights into the development of math attitudes. Third, investigating the specific behaviors and mannerisms that form the causal links between parents’ and teachers’ beliefs and children’s math attitudes may lead to effective interventions to improve children’s math attitudes from a young age. Such work will not only further our understanding of the relations between attitudes and performance, but will lead to the development of practical interventions for the home and classroom that ensure that all students are provided with opportunities to excel in math.
Basic math skills are important for success in school and everyday life. Yet many people experience apprehension and fear when dealing with numerical information, termed math anxiety. Recently, ...researchers have started to probe the antecedents of math anxiety, revealing some surprising insights into its onset, risk factors, and remediation.
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