Impact of Instructor Teaching Style and Content Course on Mathematics Anxiety of Preservice Teachers

Integrative-STEM methodologies entail integrating multiple disciplines with active design-centric teaching and learning methods. If math anxiety is prevalent, for teachers or students, then both the level of integration and design thinking may be limited. This quantitative study of 160 preservice teachers investigated how math anxiety was impacted by (a) a required math content course, (b) instructor teaching style, and (c) academic and disciplinary major. Significance analyses included t-tests, nonparametric tests, and effect sizes. Two teaching styles were compared: a direct teaching style and a more active, problem-based teaching style. The problem-based teaching style was shown to have substantial beneficial impact on math anxiety.