Learned helplessness and test anxiety in college mathematics

¶ … Helplessness in College

Background significant and notable problem within higher education is the conditioned state of mind associated with learned helplessness. Challenges to educators are often played out through the compounded years of this learning roadblock in a student's life, leaving many individuals with test anxiety so great that they are unable to test effectively on the concepts they have learned.

Learned helplessness (e.g., when someone learns from repeated, unpleasant, and painful experiences that he or she is unable to control the aversive environment or escape, that person will gradually lose the motivation to change the situation) (Roberts, 1996, p. 7-8)

Challenge is especially high with regard to math learning. (Tobias, 1991, pp. 91-93) The system design therefore creates a challenge to students and instructors, who have no other way, than testing to determine the level of knowledge a student has actually achieved during instruction. Any situation where an alternative to testing cannot be offered, such as math or statistics people with even a very high level of intelligence can be at risk for learned helplessness challenges. These students historically have very little trouble performing in situations where the learning of coarse material can be proven through creative means such as composition writing, yet with regard to functions that require sets of rote memorization the student appears not to have gained these concepts, regardless of their actual level of knowledge. (Maimon, 2002, p. 32)

Purpose

This work proposes to analyze the phenomena of learned helplessness in college age students to increase the body of growing research on the subject and illicit greater understanding of its causes and possible solutions.

Logic Model greater understanding of the phenomena of learned helplessness among college students will assist educators in development of plans to better serve the needs of these students, through initial recognition of the problem and possibly alternative grading systems, or at the very least alternative testing environments for those who are effected. Logical solutions to test anxiety and math anxiety will assist students in their goals of combating the effects of learned helplessness through proactive treatments empowering students to break free from the psychological pitfalls of the phenomena, and eventually achieve success in troubling curricula.

Ultimately, the work will serve as a first step to assist educators in developing a comprehensive guide to intervene in situations where learned helplessness may be present.

Statement of Problem

The phenomena of learned helplessness has been met by many theories and many myths about the learning ability of the student, garnered from the work professionals do with students. Some of the real reasons have been gleaned from the answers students themselves give for their failure to perform in test environments, possibly recounting historical failures, despite their possible or real competence with the material and some are observational for the instructor, such as competence on daily work, or in class work but failure on exams.

An enormous failure rate now exists in college mathematics courses. In fact, of approximately 600,000 students who take freshmen calculus annually, about 250,000 fail the course. This failure rate of over 40% raises some important questions: Are we discouraging our students from studying mathematics, and are we thereby conditioning them to be helpless in mathematics?

(Wieschenberg, 1994, p. 51)

The myth that students are simply not learning has lead to a great deal of challenges for both the student and educator, as the system fails the student as they fail on their exams. They have put in the time and learned the material but have little if any way to demonstrate their learning, in the present educational environment.

Significance of Study

The students challenged by this psychological pitfall are often very capable and intelligent individuals and yet they are at risk of failure, throughout their years of education, leaving them with few alternatives to achieve the success of a degree and likely better their career opportunities in the long run. Students are at risk for a further abuse by the society at large and by the educational system as there is often a skewed sense of lack of intelligence, on the part of any individual who cannot prove competency through testing.

In teaching developmental reading to college freshmen, we have seen many bright, able students who do poorly on tests and attribute their performance to their extreme nervousness coming into the test or their inability to "think" or concentrate during the test.

(Mealey & Host, 1992, p. 147)

The problem is evident in many ways, and yet available opportunities for students are limited to traditional means such as help labs and study skills courses.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Those who are at greatest danger for the phenomena of developing learned helplessness seem to be those who begin their young educational lives with learning troubles, yet probably the most difficult individuals to help fall through the cracks, having proven their intelligence in many other subjects but being unable to do well in test-based subjects. In short those individuals, who are at greatest risk for undetected learned helplessness, are those who have a higher ability to self-adjust to their difficulties, masking the problem until solutions and challenges become more complicated on a secondary and post-secondary level. This work will first analyze some of the available empirical data on learned helplessness individually and then address a few available works on the two linked phenomena, as a springboard to this call for research.

There have been many attempts to develop techniques to combat learned helplessness: "Despite the development of such techniques, sole reliance on the pessimistic explanatory style as a risk factor for helplessness abounds." (McKean, 1994, p. 178) The challenge is the then reducing the pessimistic explanatory style in instruction and intervention,

The pessimistic explanatory style has been shown to be related to failure and quitting among beginning insurance salespeople (Seligman & Schulman, 1986), poor academic performance in college students (Peterson & Barrett, 1987), depression in college students told they had failed an exam (Metalsky, Abramson, Seligman, Semmel, & Peterson, 1982), and most recently, stress-induced illness in members of Harvard University's longitudinal Study of Adult Development (Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988).

(McKean, 1994, p. 178)

Within the field of sociological/psychological literature there has been a great deal of summary work associating the phenomena of learned helplessness and higher education, and a great deal of specialized empirical research on the implications of risk factors, such as gender, learning disabilities and even underlying domino psychological issues such as depression associated with learned helplessness. (Campbell & Henry, 1999, p. 95)

Setting

Within the research there are many hints and models that determine the effects and offer combative interventions for the phenomena of learned helplessness. The review leaves this researcher with the idea that the challenges of LH are certainly avoidable by many and that the ability of the college to intervene effectively would impact the college population as a whole. Research will be conducted with students already seeking assistance, in college help labs and students already taking either mandated or voluntary study skills courses as a result of academic probation or possible academic intervention, as a result of entrance testing. With regard to this study further research needs to be done on how intervention programs affect outcome of success.

Sample

Thirty students will be chosen voluntarily through billboard postings in study skills courses and in math and writing labs. Students will be offered free lunches, at meetings and also 20 dollars for the completion of the study. Students will be studied on outcomes of their completion of assistance through the study skills class and also through their situational guidance in writing labs and math labs.

Measures

An outcomes questionnaire will be devised to test the subjects self report of assistance by study skills courses and/or lab assistance and whenever possible before and after grade performance will be addressed anonymously. Additionally a marker of before and after self-report pessimistic explanatory style vs. mastery explanatory style will be a part of the questionnaire model.

Design

The design of the work will be a before and after intervention, that will assess the effectiveness of available offerings for assistance with LH challenges. (Conducting a preliminary assessment, in the case of a study skills class at the beginning of the term and in the case of lab assistance at the first visit and then the last visit for the term)

Procedures

The questionnaire will be offered in an open setting, think group style, where all participants will answer questioners together at a round table, during a relaxed meal. Participants will be encouraged to ask researchers questions about the topic after reading the questions but prior to answering them. The fact that there are no right or wrong answers will be stressed and that all results are confidential and anonymous. The questionnaire will contain an informed consent clause explaining the purpose and scope of the study. The before questionnaire will ask questions about the students assumed optimism or pessimism about the helpfulness of the intervention they are participating in while the second or after questionnaire will assess the students belief in the effectiveness of the intervention.

Questionnaires from the initial (before) group will be analyzed prior to the completion of the term, and therefore the breadth of the study and the before and after groups will be linked throughout the term. The after questionnaire will ask for any possible outcomes results such as grades on projects (where applicable) and also the feelings of competency the student might feel they have gained through the intervention. Results will be analyzed for self report symptoms of LH in the before questionnaire answers and the after questionnaire answers and also for the students self-report level of assistance (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being not helpful at all and 10 being exceptionally helpful or professing inability to succeed without intervention). From these results both the situational and the global view of the student will be garnered.

EXPECTED RESULTS

The phenomena of learned helplessness is not exclusive to higher education as it is often a challenge that has been present within the entire educational history of the student. In a younger age setting teachers have the opportunity to further evaluate the student's real abilities within other courses, while in higher education the instructor sees the student only for one class and usually only for one term. This problem will likely only get worse as the educational system in this culture transitions farther and farther toward standardized outcomes testing as the only real guide to the developed knowledge of students. (Grimes & David, 1999, p. 73)

This work will assess the most frequently used available interventions of higher education for students at risk for LH and will also summarily assess the overall usefulness of such interventions. Students who do not exhibit symptoms of LH but who utilize assistance will probably assess the offerings positively yet regard their assistance as marginal (5). Students with high levels of LH will probably assess the programs as very helpful but report grades lower than those of the non-LH students.

Studying ways in which the existing offerings of colleges and universities for failure intervention will assist future and present educators in ways in which they can better improve such offerings, and make them more user friendly to the student. The educational system needs to offer alternatives to testing and assign more importance to daily work competency, but it is unlikely that this will occur any time soon as more and more systems become funding dependant upon the outcomes testing of their students.

It is for this reason that it is imperative that educators and students learn to recognize the pitfalls of learned helplessness and create means to combat them. Studying the available options for students may assist educators in finding ways to improve what is already available. Without these sorts of logical solutions, either offering test alternatives or at least updating and bettering existing assistance programs many very capable and intelligent individuals may be barred from bettering their lives through higher education.