Journal Writing and Math Anxiety

The participants for the study were 60 students in Grade 5 from an elementary school in Central Texas. The participants were students in three math classes taught by the same teacher. Pretest data was collected using the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale-Elementary (MARS-E) to measure math anxiety for elementary students. The independent variable was journal writing, and the dependent variable was math anxiety measured quantitatively by MARS-E. Two groups of students participated in two different types of journal writing interventions, affective response journals and dialogue journals. The third group, a control group, did not participate in journal writing. After a six week intervention, post-test data was collected using the MARS-E instrument. In order to answer the research questions, data was also disaggregated by gender and ethnicity.