Instructor Misbehaviors and Math Anxiety

Instructor misbehaviors (i.e., antagonism, lectures) have been identified as instructor behaviors that negatively impact students’ success in the classroom. Math anxiety also has been identified as a barrier to students’ success in quantitative reasoning classes. The present study postulates that instructor misbehaviors are actually non-immediate behaviors, which are a set of instructional behaviors that increase the amount of psychological distance (i.e., perceived immediacy) that students perceive they experience with their instructor. As such, this paper predicted that instructor misbehaviors decrease students’ perceived immediacy, thereby increasing students’ math anxiety. This mediated relationship was supported by the data.