Maths anxiety in primary and secondary school students: Gender differences, developmental changes and anxiety specificity

By Francesca Hill, Irene Mammarella, Amy Devine, S. Caviola, M. Passolunghi, Dénes Szűcs. 2016

341 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Maths anxiety (MA) is a debilitating negative emotional reaction towards mathematics. However, MA research in primary and early secondary school is surprisingly sparse and inconsistent. Here we tested primary and secondary students' maths and reading performance and their maths and general anxiety (GA). We examined gender differences, developmental changes regarding the MA/maths performance link and investigated whether MA is linked to other academic domains (reading) and/or to other anxiety-types (GA). Results revealed that girls exhibited higher MA than boys at both educational levels. Whilst there was a reliable negative correlation between MA and secondary students' arithmetic performance, no such relationship was revealed in primary students. Finally, MA was moderately correlated with GA and, when GA was partialled out, MA remained significantly correlated with secondary students' arithmetic performance. MA was not related to reading performance when GA was controlled. It was concluded that the negative MA/maths performance link surfaces later in the educational timeline and MA appears to be both exclusively related to maths and independent of GA.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66e95e02481b628382ee7fe06dfc390eb1d9d55f

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Anxiety profiles and protective factors: A latent profile analysis in children (2018, methodology): “For example, Hill et al. (2016) found that partialling out the effect of GA reduced the significant negative relationship between MA and mathematics achievement in primary- and middle-school students.”
Self-efficacy, value, and achievement emotions as mediators between parenting practice and homework behavior: A control-value theory perspective (2016, background): “Although many studies found higher math anxiety in girls, others reported no gender difference, including those measuring general math anxiety with adolescents (for reviews, see Devine, Fawcett, Szucs, & Dowker, 2012; Hill et al., 2015).”
Math Performance and Academic Anxiety Forms, from Sociodemographic to Cognitive Aspects: a Meta-analysis on 906,311 Participants (2021, background): “Looking at MA from a developmental perspective, the negative relationship between MA and math performance may increase across years of schooling (Dowker, 2005; Hembree, 1990; Hill et al., 2016; Wu et al., 2012).”
The impact of students' gender-role orientation on competence development in mathematics and reading in secondary school (2018, background): “Studies have focused on affective-motivational factors, such as domain-specific anxiety (Hill et al., 2016; OECD, 2015), domain-specific interest as a part of intrinsic motivation (Schiefele & Csikszentmihalyi, 1995; Wigfield & Cambria, 2010), and domain-specific self-concept (Marsh, 1989; OECD,…”
Psychometric properties of the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS) in Italian primary school children (2017, methodology): “Although the scale has already been usedwith children aged 8 to 11 years (Hill et al., 2016), and adolescents aged 11 to 15 years (Devine et al., 2012; Mammarella et al., 2015), to date no published studies have confirmed its psychometric properties in a so young age group of primary school…”