Math anxiety makes people not only students perform poorly not only in school but also in workplace where there are situations that they are tested to ‘prove’ their capacity to do math also if there is any anxiety spotted while doing so. People feel a lot of tension, nervous, worried when engaging in anything that involves math.
Clinical techniques suggest that expressive writing for math anxiety incentives people to write about how they feel about their anxiety and writing themselves helps them write exactly how they feel when it comes to perform math. In addition, writing about math anxiety not only allows them to express their thoughts and feelings also help them relief from other kind of stressors that may be facing in college or workplace. Is it proven that when students write about their challenges when it comes to math and verses others that don’t write about the ones that express themselves in paper performs better than others. Students feel like they have released a stressor that was bothering them or preventing them from performing good.
To measure their math anxiety. They basically made a test anxiety test on individuals with a questionnaire that asked them how they would rate their anxiety when they were taking a test in school. On the result they found that that HMAS had higher results on the test rather than LMAs
Also, it was included score as covariate which the function is to make sure that the general apprehension was not responsible for the results but the math anxiety specifically.
On the other side writing analysis was applied to investigate the writing how specifically the relation HMAs and LMAs performance on a an individual. Things like computerized text analysis program that sorts some words into categories to calculate the category of psychology relevant degree to people that uses it differently on their writing. HMAs individuals were tested to solve the math problems using their working memory demands, this method was performed in young people and children as well the results of that was that they performed worse.
Researchers suggests that many adult students may have a long history of working-memory demands, they perform significantly worse suffering the deleterious effects of math anxiety.
A lot of work are done to undertand the exact mechanisnm of math anxiety and writing helps individuals to distance themselves from their immediate sources of stress, which previous research suggests is an important component in accounting for the benefits of expressive writing. results demonstrate in practical level an easy and effective way to disarm the math anxiety-poor math-performance relation. In addition there have been past attempts to find effective interventions for the negative outcomes of math anxiety on performance, but many of the interventions are either extensive or generally unsuccessful. For example, previous studies implementing classroom interventions such as relaxation training and group counseling were not shown to be effective at reducing the negative effects of math anxiety on performance, despite the prolonged exposure to these interventions. One bout of expressive writing can reduce the performance gap between low and high math-anxious students. It is possible that encouraging LMAs to write about their thoughts and feelings can hurt performance by creating feelings of nervousness that might not have otherwise been present. intentionally they control the manipulation to mimic real-life testing situations, it is possible that the waiting period in the control condition might have incubated anxiety. The beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes of people charged with students’ education determine the teaching methods, interaction patterns, levels of involvement, and remedial strategies that they implement with students. Furthermore, low expectations for a student’s competence can lead educators to provide feedback that communicates an acceptance of the student’s weakness. The work reported here helps shape this debate by showing that simply asking students to write about their thoughts and feelings before a test has a power to immediately reduce the impact that math anxiety has on students’ performance. Such immediate benefits of expressive writing have the potential to help students who struggle with math anxiety to demonstrate their true competency in math during testing situations that hold significant consequences for future academic success.
