User:DawnWinery Peacock/Mathematical anxiety

Math and Culture[edit]
While there are overarching similarities concerning the acquisition of math skills, researchers have shown that children's mathematical abilities differ across countries. In Canada, students score substantially lower in math problem-solving and operations than students in Korea, India and Singapore. Researchers[who?] have conducted thorough comparisons between countries and determined that in some areas, such as Taiwan and Japan, parents place more emphasis on effort rather than one's innate intellectual ability in school success. By placing a higher emphasis on effort rather than one's innate intellectual ability, they are helping their child develop a growth mindset. People who develop a growth mindset believe that everyone has the ability to grow their intellectual ability, learn from their mistakes, and become more resilient learners. Rather than getting stuck on a problem and giving up, students with a growth mindset try other strategies to solve the problem. Growth mindset can benefit everyone, not just people trying to solve math computations. Moreover, parents in these countries tend to set higher expectations and standards for their children. In turn, students spend more time on homework and value homework more than American children.

In addition, researchers Jennifer L.Brown et al. shows that difference in level of mathematical anxiety among different countries may result from varying degrees of the courses. In the same culture, there is little difference in anxiety scale that is associated with gender, while the anxiety is more related with its type. Samples show greater degree of anxiety at subscale

MEA (Mathematical Evaluation Anxiety) compared with LMA (Learning Mathematical Anxiety).

Solutions:

Furthermore, studies by Herbert P. Ginsburg, Columbia University, show the influence of parents' and teachers' attitudes on "'the child's expectations in that area of learning.'... It is less the actual teaching and more the attitude and expectations of the teacher or parents that count". This is further supported by a survey of Montgomery County, Maryland students who "pointed to their parents as the primary force behind the interest in mathematics".

Besides, James M. Fetterly, University of Central Arkansas, points out intentional experiences with mathematical creativity including alternative algorithms, divergent thought, invented strategies and problem posing impact mathematical beliefs and anxiety. If students have experience with punctuated and intentional mathematical creativity might lower the level of mathematical anxiety

The influence of Math Anxiety on Math Achievement
key ideas:

"effects of implicit math anxiety on the performance of a math achievement task. "

"First, implicit anxiety scores were predictive of scores on the math achievement task. Second, the relationship between implicit math anxiety and explicit math anxiety was minimal."

"Math anxiety presents a substantial roadblock for individuals as they attempt mastery of mathematics. Indeed, math anxiety may hinder the academic success of individuals and alter their professional trajectory later in life (Ashcraft, 2002). Thus, identification of math anxiety is crucial so that treatment options can be considered. Previous work exploring and identifying math anxiety has focused on explicit measures, as all of the published studies that we are aware of that identify math anxiety used explicit measures. The current study demonstrates the utility of using implicit anxiety to enhance the ability of traditional cognitive models to predict math anxiety and points to the possibility that implicit emotional responses play a role in math achievement. One key limitation of the current study is that all participants were college educated. Thus, their experiences with math may differ from the general public. One future direction would be to extend this research to participants outside of the academic setting. Additionally, it may be the case that American studentshave different associations with math compared to students in other nations. Future work replicating this study in other cultures would help to discern whether this is a universal effect or one which is culturally specific. Finally, the key direction for future work in this area would be implementing implicit math anxiety measures into a remediation program for math anxiety."

Working Memory and Its Mediating Role on the Relationship of Math Anxiety and Math Performance: A Meta-Analysis

This study presents a robust significant negative relationship between MA—WM confirming the relevance of the ACT. A significant indirect effect from MA predicting MP while accounting for WM is also shown, though this relationship should be interpreted with caution as there was a limited number of studies answering this question. Researchers should be aware of what type of WM-measure is used and whether the instrument is of numerical nature or not, which could impact on the MA participants. Further, our results suggest that WM-measures of both the phonological and executive components have a stronger association with MA than phonological storage processes alone, which also is stated in the ACT. We recognize that there is still a shortage of data for determining the precision and certainty of the indirect effect that MA has on MP. This question still requires further investigation. Lastly, there is the age aspect to the MA—WM relationship. Our results indicate that somewhere between primary and high school the relationship develops in strength and levels off in university. This protracted development may be connected to younger children experiencing less MA than older (Wigfield and Meece, 1988; Ashcraft and Moore, 2009). If that is the case, the findings of this study highlight the importance of early interventions to suppress anxieties that can have detrimental effects on math performance and be pertinent to general cognitive processing abilities.