Trial lecture - time and place
Place: Auditorium 3, Helga Engs hus
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
Title: TBA
Public Defence
Place: Auditorium 3, Helga Engs hus
Time: 12:00 -
Adjudication committee
- 1st opponent: Reader Kinga Morsanyi, Department of Mathematics Education, Loughborough University
- 2nd opponent: Associate Professor Eivind Kaspersen, Department of Teacher Education, NTNU
- Chair of committee: Associate Professor Ellen Brinchmann, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo
Chair of defence
- Professor Thormod Idsøe, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Supervisor: Director of SpedAims, Professor Øistein Anmarkrud, Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo
Summary
The overarching objective of this thesis is to examine how mathematics anxiety affects mathematics performance. The three studies that make up this thesis are based on experimental and longitudinal data. Proficiency in mathematics is essential in today's society, yet a large number of people do not possess adequate skills in mathematics. Although there may be different reasons for low mathematics skills, one phenomenon that is consistently associated with low Maths Performance is Maths Anxiety. This negative relationship between Maths Anxiety and Maths Performance is sometimes explained by a negative effect of Maths Anxiety on Working Memory capacity.
The first study examined if mathematics anxiety affects mathematics performance by taking up the cognitive capacity needed for problem-solving in a sample of university students. We used measures of pupil dilation as a proxy for cognitive effort while the participants did mental calculation of multiplication problems on different difficulty levels (easy, medium and hard problems). In accordance with previous research we assumed that a larger pupil size is associated with more cognitive effort (Ahern & Beatty, 1979; Beatty, 1982; de Winter et al., 2021; Marquart & Winter, 2015; Mathôt, 2018). After first establishing the problem difficulty level affected cognitive effort, we performed a moderation analysis to examine if there was an interaction effect of mathematics anxiety and problem difficulty level on the pupillometry measures of cognitive effort. The results of our analyses showed that there is a direct effect of problem difficulty level on cognitive effort (i.e. the participants use more cognitive effort to solve the more difficult problems), but no evidence of a moderating effect of mathematics anxiety was found.
In the second study, the aim was to investigate the relationship between mathematics anxiety and cognitive effort in second-grade pupils (mean age 6.8 years). The mental arithmetic problems were in this case addition problems, and they were on only two difficulty levels, easy and hard. In this study, we found both a main effect of problem difficulty level (e.g. the participants used more cognitive effort to solve the hard problems), as well as a moderating effect of mathematics anxiety. However, the interaction effect showed that the participants with MA used relatively less cognitive effort compared to their peers with no MA, indicating that mathematics anxiety does not take up cognitive capacity. Hence, the negative relationship between MA and mathematics performance does not seem to be due to a reduction in available cognitive processing capacity to solve the problems.
The third study was a longitudinal analysis of the relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance. The participants in this study are the same as in study 2, with measures mathematics anxiety and pupillometry measures of cognitive effort while solving mental addition problems and collected at two different time points, autumn second grade (M age 7.4 years) and autumn third grade (M age 8.4 years). The results of this study indicate that there is some consistency in the relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance in our sample over the course of time. The main effect of problem difficulty on cognitive effort is still present in third grade, but mathematics anxiety no longer moderates the effect of problem difficulty on cognitive effort.