| Affiliations: | DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program |
| Project Leader: | Connie Barroso Garcia cbarroso@tamu.edu Educational Psychology |
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Meeting Times:
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TBA |
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Team Size:
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3 |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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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 conferences are available and students are 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.
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Team Needs:
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Team members should have an interest and desire to learn about research and data collection methods in developmental or educational psychology. Interpersonal skills for working with participants and in a team in an online environment are also essential. This project will be most relevant to students with career goals in applied or research settings of education or psychology. |
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Description:
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In this project, we will be taking a look at the development of negative math affect of math anxiety in children and college students. A negative Interpretation bias is one factor that may be important in the formation and maintenance of math anxiety. 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 in 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 cognitive factor 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. |