The Cognitive Processing Mechanism Of Pupils' Mathematics Anxiety

Math anxiety is an important non-cognitive factor that affects primary school students'mathematics learning.The mechanism of mathematics anxiety on mathematics achievement is a hot spot for psychological researchers.In recent years,there have been theoretical explanations to interpret the mechanism of mathematic anxiety affecting mathematics achievement.Attention control theory is one of them.Attention control theory has three main points.The first point is that anxiety affects the performance of the task by affecting the individual's central executive system.The higher the requirement for the central executive system,the more obvious this influence is.The second important point is that the anxiety affects the central government.Execution of the system's Inhibition and transition functions will also affect the refresh function under greater pressure.The third point is that anxiety affects the performance of the individual's target task by disrupting the balance between stimulus-driven and goal-driven.This study is based on the theory of attentional control,and three studies are set up corresponding to the three points of attentional control theory to explore the mechanism of primary school mathematics anxiety affecting mathematics achievement.Study 1 to investigate whether high mathematics anxiety students perform worse on the central executive system than students with low math anxiety under high load conditions,Study 2 further explores which components of the central executive system are impaired in students with high math anxiety.Study 3 from the perspective of attentional system analyzes whether mathematics anxiety has attentional bias on different types of threat stimuli,thus affecting stimulus-driven attention system and target-driven attention system.The results show that:(1)With the increase of memory load,the task of mathematics students with high mathematics anxiety has a poor performance in the tasks that require the participation of the central executive system,and both the operational performance and the processing efficiency are affected.Under high load conditions,the students with high math anxiety have lower accuracy than students with low math anxiety(F=4.18,p=0.04,?~2partial=0.04),and the response time was longer than those with low math anxiety(F=3.63,p=0.06,?~2partial=0.04);(2)In the three functional components of the central executive system,students with high mathematic anxiety showed significant defects in the transition function,and the accuracy were significantly lower than those with low math anxiety(F=5.54,p=0.02,?~2partial=0.05).However,there was no significant difference between the two groups in the inhibitory function(F=0.09,p=0.76,?~2partial<0.01)and transition function(F=0.89,p=0.35,?~2partial<0.01);(3)On the numeric notation,students with high mathematics anxiety showed obvious attentional bias,and the response time was significantly shorter than that of students with low mathematic anxiety(F=5.23,p=0.02,?~2partial=0.05);on neutral words there was no significant difference between the two groups in high math anxiety and low math anxiety(F=0.05,p=0.81,?~2partial<0.001);there was no significant difference between the two groups in the formula(F=2.51,p=0.12,?~2partial=0.03).To come to the conclusion,students with high mathematics anxiety have flaws in the central executive system,especially in the transition function;students with high mathematics anxiety also have defects in the attention system,which shows that they are more likely to pay attention to threat stimuli.