Mediators of preschool children and teachers’ math anxiety development in Sweden

I started my professional career teaching Science and English as a foreign language at bilingual schools in Paraguay, my country of origin. There, I graduated as a Licentiate in English Language and Literature with a thesis focused on sociolinguistics in the classroom. Before joining the Math Education research group in Uppsala in January 2021, I pursued an MSc in Neuroscience and Education at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom.

My PhD project is concerned with exploring the bidirectional relation documented between mathematical anxiety and mathematical cognition. As my scope of research lays within a didactical framework, I am interested in finding out how teachers’ levels of mathematical anxiety might influence the development of mathematical anxiety in children attending preschools in Sweden. Another broad goal of this project is to get a better sense of how classrooms interactions impact the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, and the relationship children create with the subject matter. In order to accomplish these goals, I team with several colleagues to elaborate psychometric tools such as questionnaires, collect neurophysiological data (e.g. pupillary responses) and combine these measures with classrooms observations or video analysis to contextualize my research within the school system.