Expressive writing interventions for pre-service teachers’ mathematics anxiety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many pre-service teachers suffer from mathematics anxiety, which hinders their mathematics learning. This can cause a deficit in their mathematics content knowledge, which must be addressed to become effective mathematics teachers. The present study explored whether positive expressive writing was better at mitigating pre-service teachers’ mathematics anxiety than general expressive writing. Expressive writing is emotional writing, which was shown to be successful in medical fields to reduce anxiety and more recently in the field of education. In contrast, research on positive expressive writing has recently shown beneficial results for treating test anxiety. Therefore, the potential for positive expressive writing in reducing mathematics anxiety was examined in this mixed methods study involving 27 pre-service teachers enrolled in a hybrid (i.e., half of the instructional time was in-person, while the other half was online) mathematics for teachers course. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing groups (positive expressive, expressive, and neutral) and completed pre- and post- measures of mathematics anxiety using the abbreviated mathematics anxiety rating scale at time 1 (beginning of course), time 2 (mid-term examination), and time 3 (final examination). In addition, participants completed a measure of their mathematics ability at the beginning of the course and then proceeded to engage in the three types of writing at the beginning of each of the nine consecutive classes. Although results did not show a significant difference between the three writing groups (positive, expressive, and neutral) and mathematics anxiety, there was a significant relationship between pre-service teachers’ mathematical ability and measure of mathematics anxiety taken at the mid-term examination. This strong negative relationship demonstrated that pre-service teachers with low mathematics ability have high mathematics anxiety. Valuable insights were gained into mathematics anxiety effects on pre-service teachers, as well as contextual factors in terms of writing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".