| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Connie Barroso Garcia cbarroso@tamu.edu Educational Psychology |
| Faculty Mentor: | |
|
Meeting Times:
|
TBA |
|
Team Size:
|
3
|
| Open Spots: | 0 |
|
Special Opportunities:
|
Undergraduate students will have the opportunity to: use a research database to search for research articles, read research articles on math-related learning and affect, present research at conference, if available and interested, learn about educational and developmental psychology research, and collect qualitative (i.e., cognitive interviews) and quantitative data (i.e., behavioral and self-report measures) with college students and students in middle childhood.
|
|
Team Needs:
|
Interest in learning about content and data collection methods in educational or developmental psychology; interpersonal skills for working with participants and in a team setting |
|
Description:
|
In this project, we will be taking a look at the role of negative interpretation biases in math in the formation of math anxiety. A negative Interpretation bias is the inclination to process ambiguous stimuli as threatening. These threatening interpretations of neutral stimuli prompt physiological fear and cognitive worry that underlie anxiety. Applied to a math context, non-threatening math stimuli and contexts, such as a division equation or the math class environment, may be interpreted as threatening by students, encouraging the formation of math anxiety. Understanding how math anxiety and interpretation bias are related is imperative to tackling the prevalence of math anxiety and the long-term negative consequences that it has on math achievement and interest in science and math-related careers, yet this relation is unknown currently. In the current project, we will address this gap in the literature by investigating the unexplored relation between interpretation bias and math anxiety in college students and children in middle childhood (~students in 3rd through 5th grade). Undergraduate students will have the opportunity to read and review literature on cognitive biases, anxiety, and math anxiety and play a pivotal role in prepping materials for participant recruitment and collecting data with a novel measure of interpretation bias in the domain of math. |