Math anxiety develops in the context of multiple individual, interpersonal, and sociocultural factors. Students who struggle with math learning are more prone to the development of math anxiety. Parents play a key role in socializing their children with adaptive responses to these learning struggles. Importantly, the long-term role of parent responses to failure on their child's math anxiety may differ depending on students' achievement in math. The present study investigated the longitudinal effects of parent responses to students' failures in math learning on the development of math anxiety in late elementary and early middle school years. Participants consisted of 167 mother-child dyads. Children (ages 8–13) completed a standardized math achievement test and self-reported their math anxiety, and their mothers self-reported their learning and performance responses to their children's math failures. One year later, children again self-reported their math anxiety. Longitudinal structural equation modeling revealed that mother's performance responses to failures did not longitudinally predict students' math anxiety. In contrast, mother's learning responses to failures negatively predicted their children's math anxiety a year later, but only at lower math achievement levels. This protective effect of mother's learning responses on math anxiety was not found at higher math achievement levels. These findings highlight resilience among students whose parents respond to their math struggles in a process-oriented way. When parents emphasize learning processes, effort, and strategies after failure, rather than worrying and focusing on poor abilities, they help mitigate future development of math anxiety in their children.
Scientific reasoning is a key 21st century skill and a central goal of science education. Citizen science projects build on inquiry-based learning and actively involve students in genuine scientific research. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of a newly developed extracurricular citizen science (CS) intervention for elementary school students who were enrolled by their teachers in an extracurricular STEMM enrichment program for talented students in southwest Germany. Students participated in a CS project that was embedded in an 8-week inquiry-based science course in the field of soil science. We ran a preregistered multisite randomized controlled field trial with pre- and posttest measures. Data were collected from N = 98 third- and fourth-grade participants. Multiple linear regression analyses controlling for pretest scores indicated that students in the intervention group acquired better experimentation skills, more sophisticated views of CS, and more comprehensive knowledge about the topic of soil compared with students in the waitlist control group. Furthermore, positive effects were found on a multiple-select score (but not the full-scale score) assessing an advanced understanding of the quality criteria of experimental designs. No effects were found for a measure assessing epistemic beliefs as well as a number of motivational outcomes. These findings highlight the potential of combining CS and inquiry-based learning to foster domain-specific components of scientific reasoning in early science education.
Shame is a salient achievement emotion for pre-service primary teachers in mathematics. According to control-value theory and attribution theory, value appraisals, self-concept, and achievement contribute to the development of shame in achievement situations. Evidence on individual differences in shame and its relations to other variables suggests that person-centered approaches are useful for identifying groups for whom shame may have different functions and implications. This study investigated profiles of shame in mathematics among pre-service primary teachers, considering value appraisals, self-concepts, and achievement in mathematics. We also examined whether these profiles differed by age, gender, number of semesters completed, and first-generation student status. We used latent profile analysis to identify distinct profiles in a sample of 634 pre-service primary teachers from Germany. Participants completed questionnaires assessing shame in mathematics, value appraisals, and self-concepts, as well as a standardized test of mathematical achievement, operationalized as mathematical content knowledge. Results revealed three distinct profiles. We used the term resources descriptively to refer to comparatively favorable levels of prior school achievement, current mathematical achievement, ability self-concept, effort self-concept, and value appraisals. The High-Shame Low-Resources Profile combined high shame with comparatively low resources across these indicators. The Low-Shame High-Resources Profile combined low shame with comparatively favorable resources across these indicators. The Low-Shame Inconsistent-Resources Profile combined low shame and comparatively favorable prior school achievement, ability self-concept, effort self-concept, and value appraisals with very low current mathematical achievement. Participants in this third profile were significantly younger than those in the first profile. No further differences by demographic characteristics were found. The findings are discussed in relation to the design of teacher education programs and the support of pre-service teachers in emotionally challenging mathematics learning situations.
