Field of Study and Gender Moderation of the Association of Personality and Math Anxiety with Numeracy

Abstract

Math anxiety and personality influence numeracy, although the nature of their contribution has been overlooked. In the present study, we investigated whether their association with numeracy depended on field of study and gender in higher education. Participants were Italian undergraduates in either the humanities (N = 201) or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM; N = 209) fields of study. These participants remotely completed standardized tests assessing numeracy, math anxiety, personality, intelligence, and basic numerical skills. We tested whether math anxiety and personality interacted with field of study and gender in predicting numeracy. Results showed that math anxiety was negatively associated with numeracy independently of field of study and gender, while the effect of personality, especially neuroticism, on numeracy interacted with field of study over and above intelligence and basic numerical skills. Specifically, humanities undergraduates with higher neuroticism levels scored lower in numeracy than STEM undergraduates. These findings underscore the importance of emotional experience for a good performance in mathematics, beyond math anxiety and the other personality traits, in the students that are less familiar with mathematics. Finally, no robust gender moderation emerged, suggesting that its role may be overridden by differences associated with career choice.

Keywords:

• Education
• personality
• anxiety
• gender issues

Acknowledgments

We thank professor Maria De Paola for her useful comments to the manuscript and Morena Sabella (ANVUR) for her guidance in designing the numeracy test. We also thank all the students that took part in the study and the university professors that helped us with participants recruitment.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data Availability Statement

The data and code for this study are accessible in the Open Science Framework at this link https://bit.ly/NumeracyFieldGenderDataCodeOSF.

Notes

1 Gender can be described as the set of roles, behaviors and identities that society ascribes to men and women (see SAGER guidelines, Heidari et al., 2016). We are aware that gender entails a spectrum of identities. However, for the purpose of this research, we decided to consider gender as a binary factor (i.e., men vs. women), in line with previous studies from which our research question stems.

2 HUM or STEM were categorized according to the official classification made by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (Decree Law 942/2020, Attachment A).

3 We excluded participants with an IQ below 80, as this threshold marks the boundary between average and borderline intellectual performance (e.g., Flanagan & Kaufman, 2009). The latter may indicate clinically relevant impairments (e.g., Ninivaggi, 2009), potentially suggesting the presence of developmental disorders, which is one of our exclusion criteria.

4 European Transfer and Accumulation System university credit.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Maristella Lunardon

Maristella Lunardon is a psychologist and a PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience. Her research has been focusing on numerical cognition and numerical interventions in typical and atypical (e.g., Down syndrome) developing children. Her interests are currently on the cognitive and noncognitive factors underlying numeracy, especially in higher education students. She coauthored six publications on these topics, published in international peer-reviewed journals.

Tania Cerni

Tania Cerni has a Ph.D. in psychological science and education. She has been collaborating with different universities and research institutions in Italy and abroad on issues related to cognitive psychology and its educational implications. Her main research interests include the study of cognitive and non-cognitive factors at the foundation of low-level and high-level literacy and numeracy processes. She authored various publications on the topic, including works related to reading and writing processes, and on individual differences influencing literacy and numeracy.

Raffaella Ida Rumiati

Raffaella I. Rumiati is a professor of cognitive neuroscience whose research has been focusing on neurocognitive mechanisms underlying different systems including perception, action and language. Recently her interests lie in how cognitive and noncognitive factors may affect the life course of cognition, and numeracy in particular. During her career she has been a good citizen, serving as ad hoc reviewer, action editor, and member of grant and evaluation bodies and agencies. She has been an active member of several scientific societies and she authored about 200 publications including peer reviewed articles, chapters and reviews.