Alleviating Anxiety about Spatial Ability in Elementary School Teachers

Alleviating Anxiety about Spatial Ability in Elementary School Teachers Raedy M. Ping (rping@uchicago.edu) Claire Bradley (cbradley1@uchicago.edu) Elizabeth A. Gunderson (lizgunderson@uchicago.edu) Gerardo Ramirez (ramirezg@uchicago.edu) Sian L. Beilock (beilock@uchicago.edu) Susan C. Levine (s-levine @uchicago.edu) Department of Psychology, 5848 S. University Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 USA Abstract We present data from a teacher professional development intervention, a work circle where researchers (expert in the domain of spatial reasoning) and teachers (expert in teaching in a classroom) worked together to develop spatial tools, based on lab evidence, which could be used in actual classroom lessons. We found that, although spatial anxiety was not directly addressed during work circle activities, teachers experienced a decrease in spatial anxiety (but not math or reading anxiety) over the course of the school year. Possible reasons why this intervention was successful in reducing teacher anxiety about spatial reasoning tasks are discussed. Keywords: anxiety; spatial reasoning; teacher education Introduction The importance of studying student anxiety in educational settings has been well established, particularly within the domain of mathematics. Studies of math-specific anxiety find that math anxiety decreases performance in the moment because worries of doing badly use up important working memory resources that are necessary for doing difficult math (e.g., Ashcraft & Krause, 2007). On a more lasting level, math anxiety is associated with general avoidance of math as indexed by decreased motivation with respect to math as well as students’ educational and career choices (Hembree, 1990). For example, students who experience greater math anxiety are less likely to pursue careers in such disciplines as science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often referred to as the STEM disciplines (Chipman, Krantz & Silver, 1992). Thus, alleviating student math anxiety has important implications for both short-term and long-term outcomes. Domain-specific anxiety might be even more important to study in teachers, since they have opportunities and responsibilities to directly impact groups of students. Moreover, elementary math majors have the highest average math anxiety of any college major (Hembree, 1990). The overwhelming majority of teachers in early elementary school are female (National Education Association, 2003), and women are more likely to experience math anxiety than men (Hembree, 1990). This sex difference may be in part due to women’s anxiety about confirming a stereotype that women are just not good at math; this fear is known as stereotype threat (e.g., Spencer, Steele & Quinn, 1999). For example, a multitude of studies demonstrate that telling test- takers that the test is diagnostic of their math intelligence/ability results in increased anxiety and poorer performance in women but not in men—men even automatically experience a boost in performance when tests are described as being diagnostic (see Walton & Cohen, 2003 for a meta-analysis). Highlighting the importance of addressing teacher math anxiety, a recent study showed that 1 st and 2 nd grade female teachers’ math anxiety impacted their female students’ (but not their male students’) learning of math over the school year (Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez & Levine, 2010). Teachers’ math anxiety was directly related to girls’ math performance at the end of the school year, but not at the beginning. In contrast, boys’ math performance was not related to teacher anxiety at either time point. Further, teacher math anxiety was related to girls’ likelihood of endorsing the stereotype that girls are good at reading and boys are good at math at the end of the school year, but not at the beginning, and was unrelated to boys’ likelihood of endorsing the stereotype at either time point. A mediation analysis showed that the effect of teacher math anxiety on end-of-year performance was mediated by girls’ endorsement of the negative stereotype about girls and math. All of these analyses controlled for teacher math ability, making the importance of alleviating teacher anxiety clear, especially in domains where stereotypes about ability are common. One such domain, intimately related to math, is spatial reasoning. Compared to research in the domain of math, little is known about the relationship between anxiety, performance, and educational and career choices with respect to spatial reasoning. Lawton (1994) developed a self-report measure of spatial anxiety (or navigation anxiety to be more precise) and found that women reported higher levels of anxiety than did men. Moreover, spatial anxiety was also negatively correlated with a preference for choosing the most effective wayfinding strategy, one that requires constructing an objective cognitive map of one’s surroundings (as opposed to an easily-disrupted route strategy that relies on memorizing a series of one’s own moves). As with math, spatial anxiety is related to gender, performance and preferences. Given the finding that teacher math anxiety affects student math performance, studying the relationship between teacher spatial anxiety and student spatial