Unraveling the role of math anxiety in students’ math performance

Math anxiety (MA; i.e., feelings of anxiety experienced when being confronted with mathematics) can have negative implications on the mental health and well-being of individuals and is moderately negatively correlated with math achievement. Nevertheless, ambiguity about some aspects related to MA may prevent a fathomed understanding of this systematically observed relationship. The current study set out to bring these aspects together in a comprehensive study. Our first focus of interest was the multi-component structure of MA, whereby we investigated the relationship between state- and trait-MA and math performance (MP) and whether this relation depends on the complexity of a math task. Second, the domain-specificity of MA was considered by examining the contribution of general anxiety (GA) and MA on MP and whether MA also influences the performance in non-math tasks. In this study, 181 secondary school students aged between 16 and 18 years old were randomly presented with four tasks (varying in topic [math/non-math] and complexity [easy/difficult]). The math task was a fraction comparison task and the non-math task was a color comparison task, in which specific indicators were manipulated to develop an easy and difficult version of the tasks. For the first research question, results showed a moderate correlation between state- and trait-MA, which is independent of the complexity of the math task. Regression analyses showed that while state-MA affects MP in the easy math task, it is trait-MA that affects MP in the difficult math task. For the second research question, a high correlation was observed between GA and MA, but regression analyses showed that GA is not related to MP and MA has no predictive value for performance in non-math tasks. Taken together, this study underscores the importance of distinguishing between state and trait-MA in further research and suggests that MA is domain-specific.