The Influence Of Anxiety On Kindergarten Children’s Mathematical Learning And Its Cognitive Mechanism

Anxiety has extensive effects on cognitive process. Mathematics is based on abstract symbolic representation which also can be affected by anxiety. Preschool years are the critical period of mathematics development.Exploring the interaction mechanism of Mathematics and Anxiety can not only help us gain deeper understanding of the relationship of Mathematics and Anxiety, but also provide some useful suggestions for early math teaching and learning for children with high level of anxiety.Based on system review of the previous researches about cognition-anxiety interaction, this dissertation explored the effect of different kinds of anxiety on kindergarten children’s mathematics cognition and executive functions. There are two parts of experiment:first is about anxiety impact easy and complex mathematics task. Second part is how anxiety affects three components of executive function.303participants are all kindergarten children come form5preschools in Shanghai.High/low trait anxiety groups are screened by Spence Preschool Anxiety Scale. Then divide each trait anxiety group into high or low state anxiety groups randomly, so there are four groups:low trait-low state, high trait-low state, low trait-high state, high trait-high state. Participants who belong to high state anxiety group will go through a state anxiety arouse procedure before take the experiment task. Those four groups of children complete two mathematical tasks:experiment one(number magnitude compare),experiment two(arithmetic calculation judgment) and three executive function tasks:experiment three(shifting task), experiment four(inhibition task) and experiment five(updating task)Results show that anxiety has different effect on easy and complex mathematics task for kindergarten children.For easy task, there are no significant effect of both trait and state anxiety. But significant effect of trait anxiety has been found for complex mathematics task. With executive function tasks, anxiety effect also shows various patterns. There is no significant effect of both trait and state anxiety on updating task, significant trait anxiety effect has been found on shifting task, both trait and state anxiety affect inhibition task.Laboratory tasks have limitations with describing the authentic features of mathematical learning of anxious children.An observation method were used to overcome it. Screen one anxious and one non-anxious girl as participant to play real mathematics games and recorded all activities and speeches for subsequent analysis. All mathematics learning take place in social environment, so the social interaction of anxious and non-anxious children with peers and teachers were recorded and the patterns were summarized. These observation and analysis can help us has deeper understanding of mathematics learning of anxious kindergarten children.In conclusion, this dissertation chooses kindergarten children as subjects which can extend previous results to younger children. In addition, state anxiety is an independent variable also been introduced and this is another innovation. Besides, combined anxiety-mathematics interaction with anxiety-executive function interaction can enrich our understanding about the mechanism of math-anxiety interaction. By analyzing the activities of anxious children playing mathematical games, we know more about the math learning process of anxious and non-anxious children. Finally, based on those results, some educational suggestions were proposed...