Motivated Forgetting in Early Mathematics: A Proof-of-Concept Study.

Gerardo Ramirez

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02087

Abstract

Educators assume that students are motivated to retain what they are taught. Yet, students commonly report that they forget most of what they learn, especially in mathematics. In the current study I ask whether students may be motivated to forget mathematics because of academic experiences threaten the self-perceptions they are committed to maintaining. Using a large dataset of 1st and 2nd grade children (N = 812), I hypothesize that math anxiety creates negative experiences in the classroom that threaten children’s positive math self-perceptions, which in turn spurs a motivation to forget mathematics. I argue that this motivation to forget is activated during the winter break, which in turn reduces the extent to which children grow in achievement across the school year. Children were assessed for math self-perceptions, math anxiety and math achievement in the fall before going into winter break. During the spring, children’s math achievement was measured once again. A math achievement growth score was devised from a regression model of fall math achievement predicting spring achievement. Results show that children with higher math self-perceptions showed reduced growth in math achievement across the school year as a function of math anxiety. Children with lower math interest self-perceptions did not show this relationship. Results serve as a proof-of-concept for a scientific account of motivated forgetting within the context of education.

Highlights

Despite all of the effort that students put into studying, they commonly report that knowledge is rapidly lost once a course is over
I began by regressing spring Math W-scores onto fall math W-scores in order to generate standardized math achievement residual scores, which served as my primary outcome variable
Children’s math anxiety was a significant predictor of fall math achievement, which provides preliminary evidence of the premise that math anxiety may contribute to disfluent learning experiences that create a feeling of threat

Summary

Introduction

Despite all of the effort that students put into studying, they commonly report that knowledge is rapidly lost once a course is over. While the belief in a total loss of formally acquired knowledge is false (Bahrick, 1979), it is true that students experience a significant amount of forgetting soon after the completion of a course (Conway et al, 1991; Kamuche and Ledman, 2011). Research on longterm retention of classroom knowledge reports that forgetting arises because of blocked learning schedules (Landauer and Bjork, 1978; Dempster, 1992), a lack of subsequent relearning (Bahrick and Phelps, 1987; Bahrick and Hall, 1991; Cooper et al, 2000; Deslauriers and Wieman, 2011), poor initial knowledge structures and shallow levels of understanding gained during the course itself (Conway et al, 1991). I draw on the suppression and threat based coping literature to argue that students themselves may be motivated to forget due to negative academic experiences that threaten their self-perceptions.

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Conclusion