Teacher Immediacy and Decreased Student Quantitative Reasoning Anxiety: The Mediating Effect of Perception

Abstract

There is global concern regarding the increased prevalence of math anxiety among college students, which is credited for a decrease in analytical degree completion rates and lower self-confidence among students in their ability to complete analytical tasks in the real world. The present study identified that, as expected, displays of instructional immediacy related positively to student intrinsic motivation and negatively to student math anxiety in analytical reasoning courses. More importantly, the findings were consistent with a mediated model in which psychological response to immediacy mediated the relationships between instructional immediacy cues and the associated outputs. Implications for theory and instruction are discussed.

Instructional immediacy in the Chinese quantitative reasoning classroom

“…The present investigation sought to test whether Chinese teacher immediacy behaviors positively affected students' mathematics anxiety by testing the causal chain of teacher immediacy behaviors to perceived immediacy to students' mathematics anxiety, first among Chinese college students and then among Chinese middle and high school students. If the Kelly et al (2015) model holds true for Chinese students, then this research will further support the importance of instructional immediacy. If the model does not hold, however, it begs the question how students manage their mathematics anxiety to achieve such success in the Chinese classroom and what additional tactics educators can implement in the United States to supplement the immediacy behaviors in the battle to control math anxiety.…”

“…Some scholars suggest this perception of mathematics is actually the result of widespread coping mechanisms for math anxiety (Kelly et al, 2015;Morsanyi et al, 2014). Math anxiety is angst that can be felt as a result of manipulating numbers (Ho et al, 2000;Liu, 2016;Stuart, 2000).…”

“…Immediate behaviors include any communicative behaviors that make a message receiver feel physically or psychologically closer to the sender (Kelly et al, ; Mehrabian, ). In the American classroom, teacher immediate behaviors include eye contact, smiling, vocal inflection, movement throughout the classroom, and a relaxed body posture (McCroskey, Richmond, Sallinen, Fayer, & Barraclough, ).…”

“…Again, immediate behaviors reduce perceived psychological distance; this perceived variance in psychological distance has been called “perceived immediacy” (Kelly, ; Kelly & Westerman, ), “generalized immediacy” (Andersen, Andersen, & Jensen, ), “propinquity” (Korzenny, ), and “psychological response to immediacy” (Kelly et al, ) across bodies of literature. Because this article is designed with respect to the Kelly et al () model, it will adopt the terminology “psychological response to immediacy.” It is important to recognize immediate behaviors as distinct from psychological response to immediacy. Immediate behaviors are displayed by a message sender, and in response to observing those immediate behaviors, a decrease in perceived psychological distance takes place in the mind of the message receiver, which is the receiver's psychological response to immediacy.…”

“…The last world rankings of mathematics and science, which took place in 2015, ranked the United States 29th in mathematics and 22nd in science among industrialized nations (National Center for Educational Statistics, n.d.) while China held the 2nd and 4th positions, respectively. Many scholars attribute students' struggles in the mathematics classroom to mathematics anxiety, angst induced by interaction with numbers (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007;Kelly, Rice, Wyatt, Ducking, & Denton, 2015;Morsanyi, Busdraghi, & Primi, 2014). Scholars suspect math anxiety is not a direct barrier to students' success in the mathematics classroom, but rather an indirect barrier that monopolizes students' working memory in managing anxiety symptoms so there is not enough working memory left to focus on the problems at hand (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007;Morsanyi et al, 2014).…”