by Cindy Nebel

Does that cover photo leave you feeling a bit stressed? If so, you may suffer from math anxiety. Read on, friend, this blog’s for you!

A lot of us are nearing the end of the spring semester and students are gearing up to take some high stakes exams. For a lot of students, final exams create a sense of dread and a lot of anxiety. As if they weren’t worried enough, that worry can actually cause worse performance on exams (1). One of the mechanisms for the lower performance may have to do with working memory. When students are worried about their performance, that anxiety takes up some space in working memory that could be devoted to effortful recall or problem solving (2). We’ve talked about this issue before, but today I want to walk you through one specific strategy that can reduce the impact that anxiety has on working memory in the moments just before an exam.

While this strategy has been used in many domains, today I am focusing on a research study showing that expressive writing can be used to reduce math anxiety and improve performance on a math exam (3). In this particular study, students were given a standard math anxiety assessment and divided into groups: those with low math anxiety and those with high math anxiety. All of the participants were then given a really hard practice exam so that individuals with math anxiety would start to feel anxious. The groups were then split into two experimental conditions. In the control condition, students sat quietly for 7 minutes while waiting to take a final math test. In the expressive writing condition, students were asked to write as openly as possible about their feelings associated with the math exam they were about to take. Then all of the participants took the same test, which included easy and hard math problems. Here’s a little diagram showing this procedure:

 Researchers then looked at performance on the math test in a few different ways. Their prediction was that participants in the control condition would be impacted by anxiety - those with high math anxiety would perform poorly compared to those with low math anxiety. However, expressive writing should reduce the working memory load on the participants with high anxiety. So, when the math problems were hard, they expected to see that, after expressive writing, those with high math anxiety should perform a lot better and maybe even as well as those with low anxiety (wouldn’t that be nice?!).

It gets even more complicated though. Think of one of the harder exams you’ve taken in your life. You weren’t just fighting against the exam; you were also fighting against the clock. In order to take both of these factors into consideration, the researchers combined these two variables into one composite measure that looked at the average time it took for students to answer a question and how many errors they made. Because of this, lower scores on this combination measure means they were faster and more accurate, so just like in golf, high numbers are bad and negative numbers are really good. They did this by creating a z-score (see this blog for a little stats primer), so on the graph below, the negative scores mean less than average and the higher scores mean more than average (and remember, you want those low numbers because it means you’re fast and error-free). Here are the results:

 So what you can see here is that when working memory demands are low (easy problems), people respond pretty fast and don’t make a lot of errors, regardless of anxiety. But when they need to use more of their working memory on the hard problems (High WM demand), anxiety starts to get in the way. That’s why you see such a big difference between the individuals with high math anxiety (HMA) and low math anxiety (LMA) in the control condition on the hard problems. In the expressive writing condition (called “EW” here, but it’s really not gross at all!), those with low math anxiety perform pretty much the same as in the control, but the individuals with high anxiety perform much better, and, statistically speaking, they look the same as those with low anxiety!

Why Does Expressive Writing Work?

Why does this work? Well, we don’t know exactly. There are a few possibilities (and all of these may actually play a role here).

1)      Expressive writing may allow individuals to better organize and understand their emotions, leading to more effective coping mechanisms.

2)      Expressive writing may free up working memory by allowing the individual to psychologically distance themselves from the source of stress.

3)      Expressive writing may serve as a type of distributed cognition, allowing the individual to stop monitoring, knowing that they can pick that stress back up later (sort of like writing your grocery list on a piece of paper so you don’t have to keep it in mind… until you lose the paper).

A Word of Caution

It should be noted that this is only one study on a specific population (college students) in one domain (math). If these variables changed, it might affect how much expressive writing is needed in order to get these same effects. Still, given that this is a relatively easy intervention that takes little prep and little time, it might be worth trying to see if students who are struggling with various types of performance-related anxiety might benefit. If you do try this technique, let us know how it works for you or your students!

 References:

(1)    Ashcraft, M. H., & Faust, M. W. (1994). Mathematics anxiety and mental arithmetic performance: An exploratory investigation. Cognition & Emotion, 8(2), 97-125.

(2)    Moran, T. P. (2016). Anxiety and working memory capacity: A meta-analysis and narrative review. Psychological bulletin, 142(8), 831.

(3)    Park, D., Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. L. (2014). The role of expressive writing in math anxiety. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20(2), 103.