This dissertation study aimed to explore whether and how individual differences in verbal and visuospatial working memory capacity and executive functions influence elementary students' mathematics fact mastery and mathematics anxiety as they engage in learning using ReflexTM, a game-based, visuospatial rich adaptive learning platform for…

The mathematics education community has long emphasized applying wordproblem tasks in mathematics classrooms to foster understanding of mathematical concepts. As such, teachers of mathematics are eager to expose students to wordproblem mathematical tasks. However, students find such mathematical tasks particularly challenging, leading teachers to…

Expressive writing (EW), or writing about one's thoughts and feelings, has been posited to reduce the working memory (WM) load that pressure and anxiety can impose on test-takers. The mechanisms of EW are far from clear, however, and social and developmental questions about its role in shaping children's engagement with academic contexts remain.…

Math anxiety impairs mathematical performance even in people who are capable of completing the mathematical operations. Pets have been shown to both reduce stress and improve performance during mathematical tasks, and thus may be used to alleviate math anxiety. We tested the effects of visual pet stimuli on stress and performance during timed sets…

An abbreviated form of the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) was administered to online and face-to-face introductory statistics students. Subscale scores were used to predict final exam grades and successful course completion. In predicting final exam scores, self-concept, and worth of statistics were found to be statistically significant…

The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to assess to what extent math anxiety and math attitudes predicted math self-efficacy among community college students enrolled in one of two developmental mathematics courses at a metropolitan community college in the Southwest United States. Self-efficacy, math attitudes, math anxiety and…

This paper compares and contrasts the experiences of two parents who have chosen to homeschool their children in mathematics despite having difficulties with mathematics at school themselves. It describes the strategies these two parents used to overcome their lack of content knowledge and/or mathematics anxiety and are illustrative examples of…

The aim of this study was to determine the dimensions of the relationship between math anxiety and mathematics achievement of the third grade students with and without mathematics learning difficulties. Data were collected from 288 elementary school students using math anxiety scale and math achievement test tools. The mathematics achievement test…

Past research has revealed that, relative to primary-school students, high-school students have less-positive attitudes to mathematics and perceive their classroom environments and teacher--student relationships less favourably. This study involved the transition experience of 541 students in 47 classes in 15 primary (year 7) and secondary (year…

Literature that investigates the factors underlying arithmetic problem-solving achievement extensively evaluates the cognitive components, such as working memory (WM) and processing speed, at the basis of this acquisition. Recently, studies have shown that also the emotional factors, such as math anxiety (MA), could play a crucial role in the…

Most studies of children's attitudes to mathematics have dealt with children in second grade or later, and have suggested that attitudes deteriorate, and anxiety increases with age. The present study investigated attitudes to mathematics in 67 English and 49 Chinese children at the end of their first year of school. The participants were given…

It is with increasing importance that mathematics education research considers the role of noncognitive motivation variables alongside elements of the classroom context in investigations of student mathematics performance. This study uses a hierarchical linear modeling framework to predict mathematics achievement from three classroom variables,…

This study aims to investigate whether there is an effect of anxiety and motivation, and if so, the level of this effect on students' mathematics achievement in the transition test from middle school to high school. In this research, anxiety and motivation levels of the students were examined together with variables such as gender, pre-school…

This current study examined the reciprocal relationship between anxiety and attitude towards mathematics in elementary students. Two instruments (attitudes towards mathematics inventory short form [ATMI-Short Form] and the Revised Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Anxiety Scale [Revised-FSMAS]) were administered to 310 fourth grade elementary students.…

Art therapists use pictorial image making to help patients communicate feelings through creative expression and cope with traumatic experiences through the artistic processes (Ulman, 2001). With children, art therapy is used as a way to discern their emotional states and determine their relationships to the external world (Edwards, 2008). However,…