Testing whether paralinguistic cues alter math learning in highly math anxious adults

Recent discovery of a "math anxiety transference" effect - wherein math anxious instructors produce underperforming learners, who are then more prone to math anxiety themselves - threatens to undercut math education's provision of individually- and societally-vital numeracy skills. While previous theorists have explained this transference using person- and content-based explanations, the present work explores a communication-based perspective via the novel Paralinguistic Model of Math Anxiety Transference. This model posits that math anxiety influences the way teachers speak during math instruction, producing anxious paralinguistic cues that, when detected by learners, produce appraisals of instructor anxiety, then elevated learner state anxiety, and finally worsened math performance and math avoidance.

Data from N = 86 highly-math-anxious, adult participants were collected via Prolific across two sessions, with session two exposing participants to either paralinguistically anxious (n = 46) or paralinguistically confident (n = 40) math instruction.

Results indicated that paralinguistically-anxious teachers [H₁] were rated as more anxious, but [H₂] did not produce elevated learner state anxiety, and [H_3a-b] did not produce differential changes in math performance or avoidance, relative to their paralinguistically-confident counterparts. Rather, participants in both the anxious-instructor and confident-instructor groups exhibited significant improvements in math performance and significant reductions in math avoidance from S1 to S2. We also tested for the role of time-pressure, which did not interact with the above effects.

These results suggest that math anxious adult educators needn't be worried that their potentially-anxious speech will interfere with students' ability to learn. Moreover, they propose a low-cost, easily distributable medium of effective adult math education in an age of declining numeracy.