Many pre-service teachers suffer from mathematics anxiety, which hinders their mathematics learning. This can cause a deficit in their mathematics content knowledge, which must be addressed to become effective mathematics teachers. The present study explored whether positive expressive writing was better at mitigating pre-service teachers' mathematics anxiety than general expressive writing. Expressive writing is emotional writing, which was shown to be successful in medical fields to reduce anxiety and more recently in the field of education. In contrast, research on positive expressive writing has recently shown beneficial results for treating test anxiety. Therefore, the potential for positive expressive writing in reducing mathematics anxiety was examined in this mixed methods study involving 27 pre-service teachers enrolled in a hybrid (i.e., half of the instructional time was in-person, while the other half was online) mathematics for teachers course. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing groups (positive expressive, expressive, and neutral) and completed pre-and post-measures of mathematics anxiety using the abbreviated mathematics anxiety rating scale at time 1 (beginning of course), time 2 (mid-term examination), and time 3 (final examination). In addition, participants completed a measure of their mathematics ability at the beginning of the course and then proceeded to engage in the three types of writing at the beginning of each of the nine consecutive classes. Although results did not show a significant difference between the three writing groups (positive, expressive, and neutral) and mathematics anxiety, there was a significant relationship between pre-service teachers' mathematical ability and measure of mathematics anxiety taken at the mid-term examination. This strong negative relationship demonstrated that pre-service teachers with low mathematics ability have high mathematics anxiety. Valuable insights were gained into mathematics anxiety effects on pre-service teachers, as well as contextual factors in terms of writing.
In our technologically advanced society proficiency in mathematics is paramount to success in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) employment sector. Mathematics anxiety negatively affects an individual's physiological and cognitive functioning, which results in the individual obtaining lower achievement in mathematics. The consequences of low mathematics achievement can have devastating consequences for the individual's career in STEM fields which require high level mathematics. This article will provide a review of the prevalence of mathematics anxiety, its historical development, as well as theories from education, psychology, neuroscience and causal factors purporting to provide a comprehensive understanding of mathematics anxiety. We propose a fourth causal factor, missed opportunity, in which the individual is high functioning academically, but exhibiting mathematics anxiety. He or she is not able to perform well in mathematics due to missing the opportunity to learn the foundational mathematics knowledge necessary in STEM fields.
Competency in mathematics is needed to respond to the vast employment opportunities available in the STEM sectors. These employment opportunities all require basic foundational mathematics skills, yet there is a shortfall of mathematics abilities due, in-part, to mathematics anxiety. Mathematics anxiety can surface as fear and avoidance of mathematics and has been linked to low mathematics performance and ability (Ashcraft, 2002; Luttenberger et al., 2018). This thought paper (Snell, n.d.), paper begins with a synthesis of research on mathematics anxiety including the known causal factors: cognitive/affective, social, and genetic as well as the recently proposed causal factor, missed opportunity (Brewster & Miller, 2020). Missed opportunity refers to cases where an individual who is capable academically to comprehend mathematics but has missed the opportunity to learn basic foundational skills in mathematics. Missing the opportunity to learn foundational concepts in mathematics places great stress, which can result in feelings of anxiety. Next, a synthesis of interventions for mathematics anxiety such as mindfulness exercises (Brunyé et al., 2013) and expressive writing (Brewster & Miller, 2022; Park et al., 2014) are discussed, which led to the realization that interventions are more complex than previously reported given that other factors can affect interventions such as duration of writing, quality of instruction, or additional stressors causing anxiety, including test anxiety. Knowing the causal factors influencing an individual’s mathematics anxiety may prove beneficial to designing more focused and influential interventions.
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