Griffin Dugan

Jake Cooper

HONORS 230C

10/5/18

Ramirez & Beilock, 2011 & Ellis et al, 2016

Cooper Troopers (Griffin Dugan, Elaine Currie, Karina Paup Byrnes, Zack Golob)

1. We predicted the “control” data in all three figures, which show that those who experienced

greater anxiety did worse on the posttest.

2a. Students who wrote about their anxieties before the posttest did better than both those who

didn’t and those who wrote about an unrelated topic.

2b. This figure shows that in the control group, as students reported higher levels of test anxiety,

their final exam score went down, showing a negative correlation between level of anxiety and

test score. The expressive writing group on the other hand, displayed no trend because their

levels of anxiety and test scores were more dispersed.

3. The biggest gender difference was on the statement that read, “I do not believe I understand

the ideas of Calculus I well enough to take Calculus II.” This is the second row from the bottom

in Table 2, and shows that 35% of women reported this as a reason for not continuing the Calc

series, while only 14% of men reported this being a reason for not continuing to take Calc.

4. The last row of the table asks if students decided not to take Calc II because they did not get a

good enough grade in Calc I. This row shows that women and men performed almost equally
(16% of men and 19% of women reported this as their reasoning for dropping out of the Calc

series). When we compare this row to the one above it (that an individual does not “believe” that

they understood Calc well enough to continue in the series), we see that despite performing

almost equally in terms of grades, women were more likely than men to believe that they did not

understand Calc.

5. Write a reflection/reaction to these two studies. (This must be individual.)

The anxiety study done by Ramirez & Beilock is an interesting finding I would not have

predicted before. Their data suggests that writing about one’s test anxiety can help one to

overcome that anxiety and do better on an exam more than those who didn’t write or wrote about

a random topic. I normally would have expected that someone who wrote about their anxiety

before a test might fixate on their worries, resulting in lower test scores. This suggests to me that

embracing and acknowledging one’s test worries is more productive than repressing them or

trying to distract oneself. The second study by Ellis et al. is fairly depressing but not surprising,

as it suggests that, despite scoring similar on calculus tests, girls believe they are not good at

math. I think this is because of the patriarchal ideas that persist which suggest that math is a

“male” subject. This stereotype is evidenced by how few women have gone into STEM careers

relative to men until more recently. I believe this study emphasizes the importance of

encouraging everyone in whatever subject they are pursuing, regardless of gender. Failing to do

so only robs fields of very talented and driven people out of prejudice.