Diagnosing and alleviating the impact of performance pressure on mathematical problem solving

Abstract

High-pressure academic testing situations can lead people to perform below their actual ability levels by co-opting working memory (WM) resources needed for the task at hand (Beilock, 2008). In the current work we examine how performance pressure impacts WM and design an intervention to alleviate pressure's negative impact. Specifically, we explore the hypothesis that high-pressure situations trigger distracting thoughts and worries that rely heavily on verbal WM. Individuals performed verbally based and spatially based mathematics problems in a low-pressure or high-pressure testing situation. Results demonstrated that performance on problems that rely heavily on verbal WM resources was less accurate under high-pressure than under low-pressure tests. Performance on spatially based problems that do not rely heavily on verbal WM was not affected by pressure. Moreover, the more people reported worrying during test performance, the worse they performed on the verbally based (but not spatially based) maths problems. Asking some individuals to focus on the problem steps by talking aloud helped to keep pressure-induced worries at bay and eliminated pressure's negative impact on performance.

Keywords:

• Pressure
• Working memory
• Anxiety
• Mathematics
• Attention

Acknowledgments

Marci Sammons DeCaro is now in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Research was supported by NSF (National Science Foundation) CAREER Grant DRL-0746970 to Sian Beilock.

Notes

¹ The same correlation analyses with RT revealed no significant effects.