MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION Teachers’ Spatial Anxiety Relates to 1st- and 2nd-Graders’ Spatial Learning

Teachers’ anxiety about an academic domain, such as math, can impact students’ learning in that domain. We asked whether this relation held in the domain of spatial skill, given the importance of spatial skill for success in math and science and its malleability at a young age. We measured 1stand 2nd-grade teachers’ spatial anxiety (N= 19) and students’ spatial skill (N= 132). Teachers’ spatial anxiety significantly predicted students’ end-of-year spatial skill, even after accounting for students’ beginning-of-year spatial skill, phonologicalworkingmemory, grade level, and teachers’ math anxiety. Since spatial skill is not a stand-alone part of the curriculum like math or reading, teachers with high levels of spatial anxiety may simply avoid incorporating spatial activities in the classroom. Results suggest that addressing teachers’ spatial anxieties may improve spatial learning in early elementary school. Teachers strive tomaximize student learning across the school year, but some teachers consistently produce greater student achievement gains than others (e.g., Kane & Staiger, 2008; Sanders & Horn, 1998). In order to understand why, a large body of research has examined how commonly measured teacher characteristics—such as teachers’ own standardized test scores, degrees attained, and certification status—predict student achievement (for a review, see Wayne & Youngs, 2003). Only recently have researchers begun to take note of the impact that teachers’ emotional reactions to a given subject area can have on student achievement. For instance, recent research has established that elementary-school teachers’ 1Department of Psychology, Temple University 2Department of Psychology and Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles 3Department of Psychology, University of Chicago Address correspondence to Elizabeth A. Gunderson, Temple University, Department of Psychology, 1701 North 13th St., Philadelphia, PA 19122; email: [email protected] feelings about mathematics can impact their students’ math achievement (Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, & Levine, 2010). When female 1stand 2nd-grade teachers have high levels of math anxiety (i.e., fear and apprehension about math), their female students improve less in math over the course of the school year. Further, the relation between teachers’ math anxiety and girls’ math learning is accounted for by an increase in girls’ endorsement of the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. This suggests that when female teachers display their nervousness about math, this confirms the societal stereotype that math is for boys. Girls in these classrooms, who look to their teacher as a same-gender role model, begin to endorse this negative self-relevant stereotype and consequently show reduced achievement gains in math. The aforementioned work is important for understanding how teachers’ feelings about the subject areas they teach relate to student achievement. However, teachers’ emotional stances towards other important domains of learning that are not formally part of the curriculum but are strongly related to academic success, such as spatial skill, also need to be understood. In this article,we askwhether teachers’ emotional reaction to the prospect of engaging in spatial activities (what we will refer to as ‘‘spatial anxiety’’) relates to children’s improvement in spatial skill (the ability to maintain and manipulate visuospatial representations). This investigation is pressing in light of recent work demonstrating that spatial skills are malleable: early experiences at home and at school can improve children’s spatial thinking (Huttenlocher, Levine, & Vevea, 1998; Levine, Ratliff, Huttenlocher, & Cannon, 2012; Pruden, Levine, & Huttenlocher, 2011; Uttal et al., 2012). Moreover, spatial skills are a critical component of students’ success in math as well as their long-term achievement and participation in the STEM disciplines (e.g., Casey, Nuttall, & Pezaris, 2001; Gunderson, Ramirez, Beilock, & Levine, 2012; Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). Finally, spatial anxiety has been shown to be a valid construct that predicts reduced use of adaptive navigational strategies in adults (Lawton, 1994) and reduced performance on a mental rotation task in young children (Ramirez, Gunderson, Levine, & Beilock, 2012). © 2013 The Authors 196 Journal Compilation© 2013 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Volume 7—Number 3 Elizabeth A. Gunderson et al. For these reasons, we asked whether, similar to the domain of math, teacher spatial anxiety predicts student achievement in the spatial domain. Our main hypothesis was that teachers’ anxieties about spatial activities would influence their students’ spatial learning. Furthermore, unlike teachers’ math anxiety,wepredicted this relationwouldnot vary as a function of student gender, for two reasons. First, 1stand 2nd-graders may not be as aware of gender stereotypes favoring males in the domain of spatial skill as they are of gender stereotypes relating to math and reading, since spatial skill is not part of the elementary-school curriculum and is therefore a lessclearly-defined construct thanmath or reading. If students are unaware of gender stereotypes about spatial skills, theymaybe less likely to pick up on cues from their teacher that confirm or denythestereotype.Second,becausespatial skill isnotastandalone part of the curriculum like math and reading, teachers have more discretion in integrating spatial learning into the classroom (Krakowski, Ratliff, Gomez, & Levine, 2010). Whereas teachers are required to teachmath regardlessof their math anxiety, teachers’ spatial anxiety may actually impact whether and how they ‘‘spatialize’’ their curriculum. This may result in fewer opportunities for spatial learning in classrooms where teachers have higher compared to lower spatial anxiety. Therefore, we predicted that students’ growth in spatial skill across the school year would vary directly as a function of teachers’ spatial anxiety, regardless of student gender.