An Eye Tracking Approach to Understand the Mechanism Between Math Anxiety and Math Performance

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

Meta-analysis studies have consistently suggested the debilitating role of math anxiety (MA) on math performance (Hembree, 1990; Ma, 1999; Namkung et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019). However, specific mechanisms between this relation remain unclear. The current study aimed to understand the mediational role of students’ attentional processes between MA and math performance during an arithmetic problem-solving task.

According to Attentional Control Theory (ACT, Derakshan & Eysenck, 2009; Eysenck & Calvo, 1992), anxiety interrupts the attentional process, such that anxious individuals are more likely to engage in stimulus-driven bottom-up attention processing. Specifically, anxious individuals tend to have difficulties disengaging from threatening information, which in turn impedes their cognitive performance. For example, a previous eye-tracking study found that individuals who had social anxiety tended to dwell longer on threatening stimuli compared to non-anxious individuals (Lazarov et al., 2016). It is possible that the same attention pattern may be observed in students with high MA, which may account for their impaired performance on math tasks. In this study, we examined whether and how gaze patterns differed in threatening vs. nonthreatening conditions for math anxious students during math problem solving, and whether their gaze patterns mediated the negative association between MA and math performance.

Data was drawn from 124 students in 4th to 6th grade who are part of an ongoing longitudinal study (49.70% female). A Problem Verification Task (PVT) asked students to determine whether each of the 132 arithmetic expressions was correct or incorrect within 10 seconds (Figure 1). Sixty-four (50%) problems were presented with a threatening distractor (i.e. timer) and another 64 were presented with a non-threatening distractor (i.e. star). Eye movement was recorded during the task using EyeLink 1000 Plus (SR Research, Mississauga, ON, Canada). Self-reported math anxiety was administered using a 23-item scale questionnaire (Chiu & Henry, 1990). PVT task accuracy was calculated as the percentage of correct responses.

Results (Figure 2) suggested that MA was positively associated with gaze attention (i.e. fixation, dwell time, run counts) on the threatening distractor, but it was not associated with gaze attention on the non-threatening distractor. No significant difference was found among students’ gaze attention on the arithmetic expressions among students with different MA. Higher gaze attention on the threatening distractor was associated with worse math performance. Mediation analysis suggested a significant negative effect of MA on math performance that was mediated through gaze attention on the threatening distractor, after controlling for students’ sex, age, and grades. No such mediation effect was found for the non-threatening condition.

These findings shed light on the mechanism underlying the impairing effect of MA on math performance - MA-induced performance deficit may be largely due to the maladaptive attention pattern during math problem solving. Consistent with the ACT, our findings suggest that high MA students are more likely to engage in bottom-up attention processing (rather than top-down attention control) that distracts their attention away from the math problems toward the threatening information that is irrelevant to problem solving.

Authors

• Tianyu Li, Austin Peay State University
  Presenting Author

• Sierra Shanafelt, Texas Tech University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michaela Quintero, Texas Tech University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Leslie Monique Hasty, Texas Tech University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Zhe Wang, Texas A&M University - College Station
  Non-Presenting Author