This report of findings describes students’ self-reported difficulty and anxiety during test taking and the effect of deliberate gasping or diaphragmatic breathing on the ability to solve math problems. During the evaluation of an experiential classroom activity, 103 university students filled out a short questionnaire about performance anxiety and blanking out when taking exams. Then, they wer...

We assumed that self-control capacity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem would enable students to keep attentional control during tests. Therefore, we hypothesized that the three personality traits would be negatively related to anxiety-impaired cognition during math examinations. Secondary school students (N = 158) completed measures of self-control capacity, self-efficacy, and self-esteem at the...

Repository Citation Durette, Robert T., "Operation span task's susceptibility to math anxiety: Support from fluid intelligence" (2011). This experiment tested possible math anxiety effects on the two most prominent working memory span tasks, the operation span and reading span tasks. Math anxiety effects on the performance of the processing component of the operation span task, which is math ba...

The present paper aims at presenting the procedure of construction and standardization of operational measure of math anxiety scale (MAS). The final form of the test has 14 statements which is design to measure the math anxiety of secondary school and senior secondary school students. MAS as a bidimensional and shorter instrument in which 7 items are worded positively and 7 items worded negativ...

Teachers’ anxiety about an academic domain, such as math, can impact students’ learning in that domain. We asked whether this relation held in the domain of spatial skill, given the importance of spatial skill for success in math and science and its malleability at a young age. We measured 1stand 2nd-grade teachers’ spatial anxiety (N= 19) and students’ spatial skill (N= 132). Teachers’ spatial...

Research on the physiological effects of math anxiety is inconsistent. In this study, an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine was used to measure the cortical activity of 6 volunteer undergraduate students while each memorized and recalled lists of both scientific and common mathematics words. A paired samples t-test showed that there was no significant difference in average cortical activity be...

Individuals with high math anxiety demonstrated smaller working memory spans, especially when assessed with a computation-based span task. This reduced working memory capacity led to a pronounced increase in reaction time and errors when mental addition was performed concurrently with a memory load task. The effects of the reduction also generalized to a working memory-intensive transformation ...

Two studies addressed student metacognition in math, measuring confidence accuracy about math performance. Underconfidence would be expected in light of pervasive math anxiety. However, one might alternatively expect overconfidence based on previous results showing overconfidence in other subject domains. Metacognitive judgments and performance were assessed for biology, literature, and mathema...