Statistics is not the subject most psychology students are feverishly looking forward to. Fears and doubts about its relevance are quite common. This is especially pronounced at our institution, a large distance-teaching university with highly heterogeneous students. We recognized three clusters of students that might need special support: (1)…

The advent of COVID-19 highlighted widespread misconceptions regarding people's accuracy in interpreting quantitative health information. How do people judge whether they accurately answered health-related math problems? Which individual differences predict these item-by-item metacognitive monitoring judgments? How does a brief intervention…

This study examined how coaching by a professional development provider assuaged math anxiety in elementary teachers. Studies have shown that elementary teachers have high levels of math anxiety which can lead them to avoid teaching mathematics in productive ways and ultimately pass their math anxiety on to students. This study furthers the…

Background: Women and people of color continue to be underrepresented in many STEM fields and careers. Many studies have linked societal biases against the mathematical abilities of women and people of color to this underrepresentation, as well as to earlier measures of mathematical confidence and performance. Recent studies have shown that…

Prior research has shown negative relations between math anxiety and math performance. We posit that one potential pathway through which math anxiety influences performance of math equivalencies is through help seeking behavior during learning. Here, we examine whether middle school students' behavior, specifically the frequency of hint requests,…

In this study we investigated how to support students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness to develop their relationships with mathematics with respect to students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, self-perception in relation to mathematics and math anxiety. There is a substantial amount of research that shows how…

Comparison shopping is good financial practice, but situations involving numbers and computations are challenging for consumers with math anxiety. We asked North Americans (N = 256) to select the better deal between two products differing in volume and price. As predicted, math anxiety was negatively related to performance on this Price Comparison…

There are consistent correlations between mathematics achievement, attitudes, and anxiety, but the longitudinal relations among these constructs are not well understood nor are sex differences in these relations. To address this gap, mathematics achievement, attitudes, and anxiety were longitudinally assessed for 342 (169 boys) adolescents from…

Many college students consider statistical courses as frightening and demanding, yielding high anxiety and low competence, and correlating with maladaptive academic behaviors and low achievement. With undergraduate students, the present pre-post study compared a supportive online teaching program utilizing mandatory statistical exercises (n = 37)…

This research explores the potential causes for student's lack of interest in enrollment in marketing analytics courses. We reveal that a misconception of marketing as a "soft skills" major of study persists, which leads to biased assessment of the relevance and applicability of curriculum in regards to future career. As a result,…

This study explores three understudied facets--quadratic effects, change over time, and gender as a moderator--of the otherwise well-documented relationships between statistics anxiety and academic performance. Using pre- and post- course survey data among a sample of 111 undergraduate students in Social Statistics courses at a U.S. Midwestern…

Spatial thinking predicts Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics achievement, yet is often absent from educational "policy." We provide benchmarks of teachers' usage and perceptions of spatial activities "in practice" in the reception classroom (first year of primary school). In this questionnaire study of…

Mathematics is integral to today's world, but many students fear solving arithmetic problems. In the U.S., more than 82% of students in grades 7th through 10th fear math. In 2021, 80% of Florida high school students failed Algebra I end-of-course exam. Math anxiety has negatively impacted students' social cognitive, and academic skills. This basic…

The goal of this qualitative single case study was to explore the effects of expressive writing as a self-regulation strategy in a suburban high school algebra classroom for reducing self-reported math anxiety. A variety of stressors related to the school environment impact adolescents, including peer dynamics, stress from the high school…

Teacher expectations not only relate positively to student achievement, but also to student beliefs such as their self-concept. Nevertheless, most studies focus on the relations with student achievement, followed by studies on beliefs. Beliefs are a significant determinant of academic success and can include student self-concept or emotions, such…