Poster #38 - The Relation between Mathematics and Spatial Reasoning: Examining Anxiety and Performance in Young Children

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Research has shown that mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities in childhood predict success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines later in development (Uttal et al., 2013). Many studies have found a relation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance (Beilock & Maloney, 2015), but less work has examined spatial anxiety (Malanchini et al., 2017). In both areas, researchers have just started to examine these relations with young children. Existing work finds relations between these anxieties and performance even early in development (Lauer et al., 2015; Ramirez et al., 2012), but the specificity of these relations is less clear. Thus, in the present study we aimed to identify predictors of mathematics and spatial skills and anxieties and to see if cognitive anxieties exhibit domain-specificity in their relations with children’s cognitive performance.
The pilot sample consisted of 70 first graders during the 2017–18 school year. This sample will be augmented with approximately 400 additional children who will participate during the 2018–19 school year. Children completed self-report measures of mathematics (Ganley & McGraw, 2016) and spatial anxiety (Ramirez et al., 2012), an adapted version of the EMSA, a standardized mathematics test (Schoen et al., 2017), the Thurstone Mental Rotation subtest (Thurstone, 1974), and the TOSREC (Wagner et al., 2010), a standardized reading test, which will be used as a covariate.
As expected, mathematics anxiety was positively related with spatial anxiety (r=.37, p=.002; see Table 1) and negatively related to mathematics performance (r=-.27, p=.024) and mental rotation performance (r=-.25, p=.038). Mental rotation performance was positively related to both mathematics performance (r=.54, p<.001) and reading performance (r=.53, p<.001). Mathematics performance was also positively related to reading performance (r=.57, p<.001). Surprisingly, the relation between spatial anxiety and mental rotation performance was not significant (r=-.16, p=.19).
We conducted regression analyses (See Table 2) to examine what factors are specific predictors for mathematics and spatial performance and anxieties, by considering these predictors together in models along with reading performance as a covariate. For mathematics performance, both mental rotation performance and reading performance were significant predictors (p<.005), but the anxiety variables were not. For mental rotation performance, mathematics performance and reading were significant predictors (p<.005), but the anxiety variables were not. For mathematics anxiety, spatial anxiety was the only statistically significant predictor (p=.001). For spatial anxiety, mathematics anxiety was the only statistically significant predictor (p=.001).
These findings provide additional evidence for the relation between spatial and mathematics skills, even when controlling for reading skills (Uttal et al., 2013). Similar to other work, we find evidence for a relation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance (Ganley & McGraw, 2016; Vukovic et al., 2013). Contrary to existing research (Lauer et al., 2015; Ramirez et al., 2012), we do not find a relation between spatial anxiety and spatial performance. Importantly, relations appeared in combined models only between factors within anxiety or within performance, but not across. These results suggest that anxieties do not exhibit domain-specific relations with skills early on, but rather relate more with other similar affective factors.

Authors

• Elyssa A Geer, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• Colleen M Ganley, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Connie Barroso, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert C Schoen, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christopher Schatschneider, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author