133F Post Midterm 2 Week 10 Lecture 2

Anxiety

1) beilock (2010), Gunderson, Ramirez, Levine

2) Ramirez (2011), Beilock

Beilock (2010)

Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement

Ramirez (2011)

writing about testing worries boost exam performance in the classroom

The study of teachers’ math anxiety found that teachers math anxiety is related to

girls math achievement

• They did not look at girls math ANXIETY

• they did not measure anxiety so we cannot say anything about girls math anxiety

Writing about testing worries immediately before taking a test has been shown to

improve test performance

According to the findings of Ramirez and Beilock, if you want to improve your performance on the final, what should you do immediately prior to taking the exam?

advise that you write about your exam related worries.

• That it's not just writing that helps. It's not writing about what makes you happy. It's not writing something emotional. It's not writing about the content of the exam. 6:49 It's writing about your worries that helps.

Math Anxiety Beilock 2010

• looking at elementary school kids

math anxiety across various college majors GREATEST to LEAST

elementary education → humanities → Social Sciences → business → health Sciences → math/science → physical sciences

main concern from the chart of college majors and relative math anxiety

what happens when people with high levels of math anxiety are responsible for teaching our kids math? (elementary education)

hypotheses (spoiler: all are supported by the results)

1. the more math anxiety a female teacher has, the lower her students math achievement will be.

• inverse relationship

• high levels of math anxiety among teachers means low levels of math performance among students.

2. this relationship will only hold true for girls

• children are more likely to emulate attitudes of same gender vs other gender adults

• girls see themselves in gender like adults so a female teacher would serve as a model for a female student.

• if a female teacher has a high level of math anxiety, it would be the female students in the class who are most negatively impacted by that.

3. traditional academic gender stereotypes account for that relationship

• its going to point to a mediation analysis

• gender stereotypes are a mediator

• There's a thing that come in between teachers math anxiety and students math achievement

study 1 method (2010)

• n = 17 1st and 2nd grade teachers (all female)

• n = 117 Ss 1st and 2nd grade

study 1 measures

• measured teachers math anxiety

• at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year

  • measured students math achievement

  • measures students gender ability beliefs

what we are thinking vs what they studied

what we are thinking:

teachers math anxiety → students math anxiety → students math performance

what they studied:

teachers math anxiety → students gender ability beliefs → students math performance

• carve into head that the mediator is gender ability beliefs

how did they measure gender ebility beliefs

• had people draw a picture of someone who is good at math

  • most all people drew someone/something along the lines of a male

  • stereotype of people thinking men are good at math

study 1 results

at the beginning of the school year, teachers math anxiety were not related to either:

• students math achievement

• students gender ability beliefs

at the end of the school year, the more anxious the tecaher

• the more likely girls were to endorse gender role stereotypes (not boys they were not impacted)

• the lower the girls math achievement (not boys)

at the end of the year, girls who endorsed gender stereotypes

• had lower math achievement scores than girls who did not endorse the stereotype

• had lower math achievement than all the boys

direct effect of mediation model

• teachers math anxiety predicted girls math achievement

• beta -0.21* which is significant that is a significant predictor and it is negative

• negative means its an inverse relationship

• High teacher math anxiety means lower girls math scores

  • high math achievement and low teacher math anxiety are the other combination

in between effect of mediation model

• gender ability beliefs is the mediation variable

• beta 0.31* teacher math anxiety on gender ability beliefs is positive and significant

  • higher teacher math anxiety means higher gender ability beliefs

• beta -0.23* gender ability beliefs on girls math achievement is significant and negative

  • meaning that high levels of gender ability beliefs correspond with low girls math achievement

• the opposite is also true: low levels of gender ability beliefs are associated with higher girls math achievement.

direct relationship before and after mediation

• direct relation before mediation was significant

• direct relation after mediation was not significant anymore

• that direct relationship is no longer predictive because the relationship is powerfully predictive there is no variance left to significantly predict.

• math teachers anxiety predicts gender beliefs and gender ability beliefs predict girls math achievement

• NOT MATH ANXIETY NOT MATH ANXIETY

mediation model summary

• female Teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math

why should we care?

• we have a whole bunch of teachers in classrooms all the time who perhaps are passing along their math anxiety

• it would be great if we could work on teachers math anxiety.

• It would be really terrific if teacher education programs would send new teachers off to classrooms feeling confident in math

• women tend to be underrepresented in the hard sciences, and this might be part of the reason like that they have not had good role models.

ramirez 2011

• testing worries

working memory (WM)

• a short term memory system involved in the control and regulation of a limited amount of information immediately relevant to the task at hand.

  • the memory that you rely on when you're working on a task.

  • You have a limited capacity

  • if your working memory is being taken up by stereotype threat then you have less working memory available to work on the task at hand

hypotheses

• worries can occupy “space” in WM and by occupying that space it adversely affects performance

  • you have less working memory available to work on the task

• Expressive writing might

  • help reduce rumination and

  • alleviate the burden of worry on WM, free up space to have more working memory to use for what you're trying to do.

  • …which might enhance performance

    • In some way expressive writing can be cathartic

    • it can be good to get some stuff out that can have a positive effect

4 studies (practically 3)

2 lab studies

2 randomized field experiments (combined for us)

• The two field experiments were actually exactly the same, but they were conducted one year apart,

• there was no meaningful difference across the two years.

lab study 1 method

• n = 20 college students

• math pre-test

  • pretest because they did it before they did anything else

• Induced Pressure

  • Monetary Incentives ($ for performance on our math test)

    • the better you do on this math task that you're going to do, the more money you'll get

  • Peer Pressure (“team effort” and partner already succeeded)

    • Your partner has already done the math task. And the good news is they did well.

    • but it's a team effort. So now all the pressure's on you for the team

  • Social Evaluation (videotaped and teachers and students would watch)

    • going to videotape you as you do this math test

    • make it so other teachers and students can watch you take your math test.

lab study 1 conditions

control: half Ss had to sit quietly for 10 minutes after being stressed out

treatment: other half of Ss were given expressive writing assignment after being stressed out

• where they were asked to write down their thoughts about the test they were about to take

regardless of group it took 10 minutes

lab study 1 DVs

given a math posttest

lab study 1 hypothesis

• Their hypothesis was that writing would eliminate choking under pressure.

lab study 1 results

Pretest: no difference across experimental and control group

• meaning random assignment worked

Posttest: experimental (expressive writing) group performed significantly better than control group

Control group: choked and performed significantly worse in posttest than pretest

Experimental group: improved significantly from pretest to posttest

lab study 1 remaining question

would any kind of writing help/alleviate pressure?

maybe its enough to be distracted by writing itself not just expressive writing

lab study 2

• replication of study 1

lab study 2 conditions

• Control: sit quietly for 10 minutes

• treatment v1: expressive writing assignment

• treatment v2: unrelated writing assignment; write about an unrelated, unemotional event

lab study 2 results

pretest: no difference across the groups

posttest:

• control groups: performance dropped significantly

• expressive writing groups: significant gain

• unrelated writing group: their performance dropped significantly but not as bad as control group

  • more like the control group not like the expressive group

lab study 2 analysis of writing content

• expressive writing group used more anxiety related words than did the unrelated writing group

• hypothesis:

  • if writing negative thoughts underlies performance difference, controlling for them should make the difference go away

• result:

  • When proportion of worry related sentences was taken into account, the interaction became non-significant

    • that is what “worked” in the expressive writing group is that Ss wrote about their WORRIES

field study 1+2 hypotheses

1. expressive writing will eliminate negative or the negative relationship between test anxiety and performance.

• the finding we already got so far

2. students most prone to worry (most anxious) would have the largest benefit of writing. What sort of makes sense.

• people who are most worried have the most to gain

field study 1+2 method (same study twice, one year apart)

• N = 51 & 55 9th graders about to take a final

• within their regular class, they were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions:

  • expressive writing: write thoughts about coming exam

  • control: write thoughts about a topic not the exam (can mask the fact that you're doing a different writing assignment)

• given 10 minutes to write

field study 1+2 measures

• test anxiety

• midterm and final exam score

field study 1+2 results

• Control condition: the higher the Ss’ test anxiety, the lower their final exam score

• Expressive writing condition: no correlation between Ss’ level of anxiety and their final exam score

• median split on anxiety

  • those low in anxiety showed no difference on the final as a function of writing condition

    • people who had low anxiety didn’t find much help from the writing condition

  • those high in anxiety who wrote expressively outperformed control group from a (B- to a B+) and performed similarly to those low in anxiety

    • high anxiety → write → become like low anxiety

why should we care?

as an intervention:

• its quick

• its easy

• its cheap

• it requires no outside help required