Effect of Gender on Math Anxiety: Insights from the frAMAS study

Math anxiety refers to negative emotional responses to math and math-related situations with important short-term and long-term consequences (e.g. math avoidance and career path foreclosures). We took the opportunity of a validation study (N = 1000) of a French version of the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (frAMAS) to look at the influence of gender and other personal variables on math anxiety experienced by adults aged from 18 to 87 years. The questionnaire was administered online, one item after the other, with optimized visual display. The results confirmed the two-factorial structure (related to learning vs. being tested), strong internal consistency ( = .89), and good convergent/divergent validity (r = .45) with a measure of general anxiety (STAI-Trait). A regression analysis confirmed the previously reported effect of gender on math anxiety, with women being more anxious than men. Interestingly, this difference was more pronounced for testing than learning situations. The professional sector had also an effect beyond gender, with individuals from the Sciences & Technologies sector being less anxious than individuals from other sectors. Other factors influenced the responses beyond gender and sector. In particular, perceiving the attitude of math teachers as negative was associated with a higher level of anxiety, especially in women. Overall, the results show that gender is an important but not unique predictor of math anxiety scores and open up interesting perspectives to minimize anxiety levels through classroom accommodations.

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UCLouvainSSH/IPSY - Psychological Sciences Research Institute

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Geers, L., Pesenti, M., & Andres, M. (2023). Effect of Gender on Math Anxiety: Insights from the frAMAS study. Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society Conference, Loughborough. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/24103