Math Anxiety, Working Memory, and Math Achievement in Early Elementary School

Abstract

Although math anxiety is associated with poor mathematical knowledge and low course grades (Ashcraft & Krause, 2007), research establishing a connection between math anxiety and math achievement has generally been conducted with young adults, ignoring the emergence of math anxiety in young children. In the current study, we explored whether math anxiety relates to young children's math achievement. One hundred and fifty-four first- and second-grade children (69 boys, 85 girls) were given a measure of math achievement and working memory (WM). Several days later, children's math anxiety was assessed using a newly developed scale. Paralleling work with adults (Beilock, 2008), we found a negative relation between math anxiety and math achievement for children who were higher but not lower in WM. High-WM individuals tend to rely on WM-intensive solution strategies, and these strategies are likely disrupted when WM capacity is co-opted by math anxiety. We argue that early identification and treatment of math anxieties is important because these early anxieties may snowball and eventually lead students with the highest potential (i.e., those with higher WM) to avoid math courses and math-related career choices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science of Learning Center Grant SBE 0541957, the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, to Sian Beilock and Susan Levine; by NSF CAREER DRL-0746970 to Sian Beilock; and by the National Center for Education Research Grant #R305C050076 to Gerardo Ramirez and Elizabeth Gunderson.

We thank the children, teachers, and parents who gave their time to this research and the research assistants who helped carry it out: Claire Bradley, Jillian Aurisano, Nina Fleichler, Katie Foster, Elizabeth Hickey, Laura Kasten, and Kristin Rotar.

Notes

Note. First-grade students scored significantly below second-grade students (ps < .05) on all measures except for math anxiety (CMAQ), on which there was no significant grade difference.

¹The hard items differed from easy items in several important ways. In terms of subtraction problems, hard items depicted images of objects that were scattered randomly (e.g., crayons piled on top of each other in an unorganized fashion) making them difficult to count. In addition, these problems contained two-digit minuends. In contrast, easy subtraction items depicted objects that were well organized in a linear fashion (e.g., pennies ordered along a line) and contained single-digit minuends. In terms of addition problems, hard items were worded to prime a maximum problem-solving approach (i.e., 3 + 6), whereas easy addition problems were worded to prime a minimum problem-solving approach (i.e., 6 + 3). This difference in wording is significant as a shift from maximum to minimum strategies is associated with an increase in ease of processing and fewer errors (Geary, Bow-Thomas, & Yao, 1992; Geary, Hoard, Byrd-Craven, & DeSoto, 2004; Siegler, 1987). Lastly, hard items asked children to read an analog clock, which required children to recall specific knowledge on how to tell time, whereas easy items simply asked children to point to a clock that displayed a specific time (e.g., 7:00), which only involved the recognition of specific numbers and clock configurations (e.g., 7).

²One could also posit that there are some top-notch students (i.e., those with higher WM) who experience math anxiety because they perform well in most domains (i.e., reading) except math. If top-notch students who perform well in the domain of reading are developing math anxiety because of their particularly poor performance in math, then we would expect that these students would show a stronger negative relationship between math ability and math anxiety than those with low reading ability. To evaluate this possibility, we performed a median split of reading ability on our students with higher WM. We found that among students with lower reading ability, math ability and math anxiety were moderately associated, r(32) = −.402, p = .018, but this was not the case among children with higher reading ability, r(34) = −.201, p = .239. In other words, the pattern of results was the opposite of that predicted by this alternative interpretation of the relation between WM, math anxiety, and math achievement.