Academic anxieties: which type contributes the most to low achievement in methodological courses?

Abstract

Students’ academic achievement in courses with a high mathematical content can be affected by their levels of trait, math and test anxiety. In this study, 180 university students were assessed on these types of anxiety and the relationships between them and students’ performance were evaluated. Higher levels of math anxiety were related to a low academic achievement, but a high level of test anxiety was related only to an increase in the number of errors. Moreover, although women reported higher levels of trait, math and test anxiety than their male peers, their academic achievement was similar. We conclude that math anxiety is the main emotional factor that can affect students’ performance in these courses and some proposals to help highly math-anxious students are discussed.

Keywords:

• Math anxiety
• test anxiety
• trait anxiety
• academic performance
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Consolidated Group for Innovation in Teaching [GINDOC-UB/099] from the University of Barcelona and grants [2017PID-UB/01] from the University of Barcelona, and [PSI2015-69915-R (MINECO/FEDER)] from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund.