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Educational Psychologist
ISSN: 0046-1520 (Print) 1532-6985 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hedp20
Math Anxiety: Past Research, Promising
Interventions, and a New Interpretation
Framework
Gerardo Ramirez, Stacy T. Shaw & Erin A. Maloney
To cite this article: Gerardo Ramirez, Stacy T. Shaw & Erin A. Maloney (2018) Math Anxiety: Past
Research, Promising Interventions, and a New Interpretation Framework, Educational Psychologist,
53:3, 145-164, DOI: 10.1080/00461520.2018.1447384
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1447384
Published online: 11 Apr 2018.
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Math Anxiety: Past Research, Promising
Interventions, and a New Interpretation Framework
Gerardo Ramirez,
1,2
Stacy T. Shaw,
1
and Erin A. Maloney
3
1
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
2
Department of Human Development and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
3
School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Canada
Mathematics anxiety is a pervasive issue in education that requires attention from both
educators and researchers to help students reach their full academic potential. This review
provides an overview of past research that has investigated the association between math
anxiety and math achievement, factors that can cause math anxiety, characteristics of
students that can increase their susceptibility to math anxiety, and efforts that educators can
take to remedy math anxiety. We also derive a new Interpretation Account of math anxiety,
which we use to argue the importance of understanding appraisal processes in the
development and treatment of math anxiety. In conclusion, gaps in the literature are
reviewed in addition to suggestions for future research that can help improve the field’s
understanding of this important issue.
Success in mathematics requires that students see math as a
sensible, useful, and worthwhile endeavor (Common Core
States Standards Initiative, n.d.). Unfortunately, many students
do not hold such a productive disposition because of a deep
fear of math. In this article, we discuss math anxiety as an
important barrier to success in math. Drawing upon research
from psychology, education, and neuroscience, we highlight
the differing theories of why math anxiety develops and how
it impacts performance, discuss interventions that have been
successful in increasing math performance in higher-math-
anxious individuals (i.e., students with higher levels of math
anxiety), and provide suggestions for what we view to be new
important avenues for future research. Notably, we also syn-
thesize disparate bodies of work within the math anxiety litera-
ture to propose a new Interpretation Account of how math
anxiety develops, which we use to address several areas of
conflicting results within the literature.
WHAT IS MATH ANXIETY?
Math anxiety refers to feelings of fear, tension, and appre-
hension that many people experience when engaging with
math (Ashcraft, 2002). Math anxiety is thought to be a
trait-level anxiety and is distinguishable from both test anx-
iety (Kazelskis et al., 2001) and state anxiety (Hembree,
1990). For a math anxious student, math creates more than
a feeling of dislike or worry; it also affects physiological
outcomes such as heart rate, neural activation, and cortisol
(Faust, 1992; Lyons & Beilock, 2012b; Mattarella-Micke,
Mateo, Kozak, Foster, & Beilock, 2011; Pletzer, Kronbichler,
Nuerk, & Kerschbaum, 2015; Sarkar, Dowker, & Cohen,
2014). Notably, higher-math-anxious students show increased
heart rates (Faust, 1992) and, when cued with an upcoming
math task, show neural activations similar to those found
when individuals experience physical pain (Lyons & Beilock,
2012b). Math anxiety has even been thought to operate simi-
lar to a phobia (Hembree, 1990; Pizzie & Kraemer, 2017), as
brief exposure to math stimuli creates a behavioral disengage-
ment bias similar to a fear-conditioned stimulus (Pizzie &
Kraemer, 2017).
The most common way to identify math anxiety is
through self-report questionnaires that ask students to indi-
cate how they feel about situations that involve math,
though recent work has employed experience sampling sur-
veys (Bieg, Goetz, Wolter, & Hall, 2015; Goetz, Bieg,
L€
udtke, Pekrun, & Hall, 2013). As math anxiety is a contin-
uous construct, there is no clear cutoff point on any measure
that divides anxious individuals from nonanxious individu-
als. Most researchers choose to treat math anxiety as a
continuous variable, often plotting scores at §1SD of the
sample mean (e.g., Maloney, Ramirez, Gunderson, Levine,
Correspondence should be addressed to Gerardo Ramirez, Department
of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall,
Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095. E-mail: gerardoramirez@ucla.edu
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST,
Copyright ÓDivision 15, American Psychological Association
ISSN: 0046-1520 print / 1532-6985 online
DOI: 10.1080/00461520.2018.1447384
, 145–164, 2018
53(3)
& Beilock, 2015; Ramirez, Chang, Maloney, Levine, &
Beilock, 2016); create extreme groups using the upper and
lower quartiles of the sample distribution (e.g., Maloney,
Risko, Ansari, & Fugelsang, 2010); or divide their sample
based on §1SD of the sample mean and work with low
(¡1SD), medium (mean), and high (C1SD) math anxiety
groups (e.g., Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001).
Although there are numerous ways that math anxiety is
measured, a consistent finding is that math anxiety is highly
prevalent. In the United States, an estimated 25% of 4-year
college students and up to 80% of community college stu-
dents report moderate to high levels of math anxiety
(Yeager, as cited in Chang & Beilock, 2016). Across the 65
countries and economies that participated in the 2012
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),
33% of 15-year-old students, on average, reported feeling
helpless when solving math problems (Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2013).
Worldwide, increased math anxiety is linked to lower suc-
cess in math both within and across countries (Foley et al.,
2017; Lee, 2009). For example, in all but one of the 65 edu-
cation systems that participated in PISA in 2012, students
with higher levels of math anxiety showed lower levels of
math performance compared to their lower-math-anxious
peers (OECD, 2013). On average across OECD countries,
for every one-unit difference in country-level math anxiety,
there is an expected 73-point score gap on a standard math
assessment (which corresponds to a large effect size, dD
.81; Foley et al., 2017).
HOW IS MATH ANXIETY LINKED TO MATH
ACHIEVEMENT?
One of the most robust findings in the field of math anx-
iety research is its relation to lower math achievement
(for a meta-analysis, see Ma, 1999). Two frameworks
have traditionally been offered to explain the connec-
tion. The first argues for a Disruption Account, or that
math anxiety causes people to underperform in mathe-
matics. The second framework follows a Reduced
Competency Account, which suggests that math anxiety
is a proxy for poor math ability. We examine evidence
for these two viewpoints next.
Disruption Account
The most widely held theory posits that math anxiety
causes worse math performance through a transient reduc-
tion in the cognitive resources that are needed for success
in math (i.e., working memory [WM]). WM is a short-term
memory system that controls, regulates and actively
maintains a limited amount of information relevant to the
task at hand (Engle, 2002; Miyake & Shah, 1999). When
doing math, we use WM to retrieve information needed to
solve the math problem (e.g., multiplication products, order
of operations), keep pertinent information about the prob-
lem salient, and inhibit irrelevant information. Intrusive
thoughts and ruminations, however, can disrupt WM
(Eysenck & Calvo, 1992).
Math anxiety is believed to cause negative thoughts and
ruminations, often about the consequences of failure in the
math task (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). Thus, when higher-
math-anxious people engage with math, they are essentially
doing two things at once: (a) dealing with negative thoughts
and ruminations and (b) attempting to solve the math prob-
lems at hand. Because success in math is so often dependent
on WM resources (Ashcraft, Donley, Halas, & Vakali,
1992; Lefevre, DeStefano, Coleman, & Shanahan, 2005;
Lemaire, Abdi, & Fayol, 1996), the online burden of affec-
tive concerns has been argued to handicap WM, which in
turn affects a person’s ability to effectively solve math
problems. According to Ashcraft et al. (1992), the correla-
tion between math anxiety and performance has less to do
with math competency and more to do with worries disrupt-
ing critical WM resources.
Evidence for this Disruption Account of math anxiety
originates from research investigating differences in basic
arithmetic performance between students with high and
low math anxiety. Specifically, higher-math-anxious indi-
viduals are slower and make more errors during basic arith-
metic problems, but only for problems that require a carry
operation, which is known to load heavily on WM
(Ashcraft & Faust, 1994; Faust, Ashcraft, & Fleck, 1996).
Pletzer et al. (2015) presented neural evidence consistent
with a Disruption Account, in a study that reports a differ-
ence in neural efficiency between high- and low-math-anx-
ious students.
Pletzer et al. (2015) described neural efficiency as acti-
vating areas of the brain necessary for solving math prob-
lems while deactivating other competing networks that are
unrelated to math. Low-math-anxious students showed this
efficiency with increased activation in the dorsolateral pre-
frontal cortex (a sign of engagement in cognitive and atten-
tional control), paired with decreased activation in the
default mode network (a sign of decreased self-reflection
and emotional processing). However, higher-math-anxious
students showed increased activation in the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex but also less deactivation of the default
mode network. Important to note, these group differences
were found even though performance was equivalent across
higher- and lower-math-anxious students. Put simply,
whereas lower-anxious students show only task-relevant
neural activation, math-anxious students show both task-
relevant and task-irrelevant activation.
Further evidence for the role of affective concerns in
math-anxious students’ performance comes from
research by Sarkar et al. (2014), in which a transcranial
direct current stimulation (tDCS) was administered to
the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of higher and lower
146 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
math anxious students before solving math problems.
The authors theorized that applying tDCS to the dorso-
lateral prefrontal cortex, a frequent target for emotional
control in stimulation studies (Boggio, Zaghi, & Fregni,
2009), would enhance emotional control in participants,
which could lead them to perceive numerical tasks as
less negative/stressful. The results showed, as predicted,
higher-math-anxious students who received the tDCS
solved math problems faster and showed a greater
recovery of the stress-related hormone cortisol than par-
ticipants who received the control stimulation. These
findings further implicate affective concerns as an obsta-
cle that math-anxious students must overcome to
improve WM efficiency and their performance in math
(Sarkar et al., 2014).
WM plays an important moderating role in the rela-
tion between math anxiety and math achievement. In a
series of studies, Ramirez and colleagues (Ramirez
et al., 2016; Ramirez, Gunderson, Levine, & Beilock,
2013; see also Vukovic, Kieffer, Bailey, & Harari,
2013) examined how individual differences in math anx-
iety and WM might relate to student performance on a
standardized test of math achievement. Although one
could expect that high-WM students would be the least
impacted by math anxiety—after all, they have more of
this necessary cognitive resource—the results revealed
that these students may be the most susceptible to the
impact of math anxiety.
Even though this finding seems counterintuitive at
first, Ramirez and colleagues explained it as follows:
People who are higher in WM capacity tend to rely on
strategies that are highly dependent on WM to execute.
When these people experience negative thoughts that
co-opt their WM resources, they no longer have the
WM needed to complete their strategies and perfor-
mance suffers. Their lower-WM-capacity peers, on the
other hand, tend to rely on problem-solving strategies
that are less dependent on WM, so anxiety has less of a
disruptive affect. Other research has found evidence of
this particular finding through not only longitudinal
research in second- and third-grade children (Vukovic,
Kieffer, et al., 2013) but also large-scale international
assessments. For example,PISAdatashowthatthe
inverse relation between math anxiety and math perfor-
mance is strongest among the highest achieving 15-
year-old students who are likely to also have superior
WM performance (Foley et al., 2017; OECD, 2013).
Collectively, these findings provide evidence in support
of a Disruption Account where math anxiety impacts per-
formance by triggering negative thoughts and ruminations
that co-opt the WM resources necessary for solving math
problems. Hence, according to a Disruption Account, the
reason that math anxiety relates to lower achievement is
because math anxiety causes poor math performance/
abilities.
Reduced Competency Account
Although Ashcraft and colleagues’ Disruption Account of
math anxiety represents the dominant account of how math
anxiety relates to math achievement, there is also evidence
in support of a Reduced Competency Account, which
argues that math anxiety is actually the outcome of poor
math ability. In this account, a student’s reduced compe-
tency leads to disfluent learning and performance, which
then contribute to math anxiety. Math anxiety is thus an
outcome of poor math ability. Variations in this Reduced
Competency Account have been proposed as an explana-
tion for both the math anxiety–performance link and why
individuals develop math anxiety at all (which we address
in a different section). A few frameworks have been sug-
gested under a Reduced Competency Account to explain
how poorer skills may relate to math anxiety.
The first framework, posited primarily by Maloney and
colleagues, is referred to herein as the Numerical/Spatial
Difficulties framework. In this framework, individuals start
with lower numerical/spatial skills, and as a result they
underperform in math. As a result of this underperform-
ance, people become anxious. An additional assumption of
the Numerical/Spatial Difficulties framework is that
reduced abilities may cause math anxiety, for example, by
increasing sensitivity to negative social cues in math
(Maloney, 2016).
Evidence in support of the Numerical/Spatial Difficulties
view comes from a series of studies in which higher-math-
anxious adults were slower to complete simple numerical
and spatial tasks, such as counting objects (Maloney et al.,
2010), choosing the numerically larger of two single digits
(Maloney, Ansari, & Fugelsang, 2011), or imagining what
a three-dimensional object looks like when rotated
(Ferguson, Maloney, Fugelsang, & Risko, 2015; Maloney,
Waechter, Risko, & Fugelsang, 2012). For example,
Maloney et al. (2010) asked undergraduate students to
identify the number of squares presented on a computer
screen (set sizes ranged from 1 to 9). They found that when
five or more squares were presented, higher-math-anxious
students made more errors and were slower at counting
compared to their lower-anxious peers. Similar results were
found with other simple numerical and spatial tasks, sug-
gesting that math anxiety may initially arise because of dif-
ficulties around numerical and spatial processing (see
Maloney, 2016). In a similar vein, event-related potential
studies have found neural evidence that higher-math-anx-
ious students may have a less precise understanding of
numerical magnitudes (N
u~
nez-Pe~
na & Su
arez-Pellicioni,
2014).
Another proposed framework within the Reduced
Competency Account suggests that students who have
reduced math abilities avoid taking math classes and
leveraging opportunities to hone their math skills (e.g.,
doing math homework, engaging in math classes; Hembree,
MATH ANXIETY 147
1990). This avoidance can cause students to fall even fur-
ther behind in their math understanding and lead to math
anxiety. Consistent with this claim, students who are math
anxious report taking fewer math courses (Ashcraft & Kirk,
2001; Hembree, 1988; LeFevre, Kulak, & Heymans, 1992),
and math anxiety among adolescent students has
traditionally been related to less intent to take math courses
(J. S. Eccles, 1984; J. E. Eccles, Adler, & Meece, 1984;
Meece, Wigfield, & Eccles, 1990). Further, participation in
informal math activities outside of school has been linked
to children’s math achievement (e.g., LeFevre, Polyzoi,
Skwarchuk, Fast, & Sowinski, 2010; Ramani, Rowe, Eason,
& Leech, 2015; Skwarchuk, Sowinski, & LeFevre, 2014;
Thompson, Napoli, & Purpura, 2017), and it is possible that
children with math anxiety may also avoid informal math
experiences (although this hypothesis needs to be explicitly
tested).
Comparing the Disruption and Reduced Competency
Accounts
In summary, the Disruption Account claims that math anxi-
ety causes poor math performance by depleting important
WM resources, whereas the Reduced Competency Account
suggests that reduced math abilities leads to underperform-
ance and results in math anxiety. The Disruption Account
would thus point toward the removal of worries as a guide-
post in the development of interventions to treat math anxi-
ety. In contrast, the Reduced Competency Account would
predict that the removal of worries would not completely
remove performance difficulties, as math-anxious individu-
als still lack the necessary math skills, especially in the face
of more challenging math. These two views make very dis-
tinct recommendations for the development of remediation
strategies for reducing math anxiety and the possible impact
of math anxiety (for an additional review of these accounts,
see Carey, Hill, Devine, & Sz€
ucs, 2015).
It is important to note that these two classes of theories
are not entirely at odds with each other. Specifically, the
Reduced Competency class of theories is agnostic as to
whether math anxiety can also cause negative thoughts and
ruminations that can impact performance. Although we
have discussed these two general viewpoints as somewhat
opposed to each other, recent work suggests that it is highly
likely that the relation between math anxiety and math
achievement is bidirectional (Carey et al., 2015). Findings
from studies that use functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing (fMRI) to examine differences in brain activation
between higher- and lower-math-anxious children during
math tasks support both the Disruption Account and the
Reduced Competency Account. For example, Young, Wu
and Menon (2012) examined children between the ages of
7 and 9 who were tasked with judging whether solved math
problems (addition and subtraction) were correct or incor-
rect while inside an fMRI scanner. During the task, higher-
math-anxious children showed more activation in brain
regions associated with processing negative emotions and
threatening stimuli (i.e., the amygdala), and they showed
less activation in brain regions associated with WM (i.e.,
the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal
lobe; Young et al., 2012). In addition, higher-math-anxious
children also showed reduced activation in posterior parie-
tal cortex regions known to play a critical role in numerical
and mathematical cognition.
The finding that math-anxious students show activation
both in cognitive control and numerical processing regions
suggests that math anxiety is both the cause and the out-
come of poor math abilities; these findings support both the
Disruption Account and the Reduced Competency Account.
Although these two accounts help us understand the con-
nection between math anxiety and achievement, in the next
section we focus on what causes math anxiety itself.
WHAT CAUSES MATH ANXIETY?
A great deal of effort has been expended to understand what
causes math anxiety, but this research has yet to produce
conclusive answers. As an individual-difference trait, math
anxiety is not something researchers can systematically
manipulate, so researchers must piece together a collective
picture of what causes math anxiety based on several bodies
of work across development. Currently, theories designed
to explain the development of math anxiety fall broadly
into one of three categories: (a) poor math skills, (b) genetic
predispositions, or (c) socioenvironmental factors. Next we
review the evidence for these dominant accounts, and then
present evidence for a new Interpretation Account.
Poor Math Skills
In the previous section, we introduced the Reduced
Competency Account, which argues that it is the associa-
tion between math and numerical/spatial skills that best
explains this inverse relation. In this section, we elaborate
on this account by reviewing the arguments that math anxi-
ety is actually caused by reduced math competency. That
is, math anxiety arises from difficulties in numerical and/or
spatial processing.
Early evidence for a Reduced Competency Account was
found through longitudinal research that argued that math
achievement could cause math anxiety. One of the most
thorough longitudinal studies of math anxiety was con-
ducted by Ma and Xu (2004), who examined the causal
ordering between math anxiety and math achievement
using data from the Longitudinal Study of American
Youth— a national study that examined student attitudes
and achievement across 6 years (from seventh to 12th
grade). Math anxiety and math achievement were measured
once per year for 5 years, and the authors used these indices
148 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
to test for cross-lagged effects. The results revealed several
important findings.
Ma and Xu (2004) found that higher math anxiety in pre-
vious years predicted lower math achievement in subse-
quent years; however, these effects were small and
occurred only in the early grades of junior high. Second,
lower math achievement in previous years predicted higher
math anxiety in subsequent years. In fact, all of the negative
paths from prior math achievement to later mathematics
anxiety were significant, considerably larger, and more con-
sistent than the paths from early math anxiety to later math
achievement. This result falls well in line with an account
that reduced math abilities/skills contribute to math anxiety.
A similar set of findings has been found between
achievement and math anxiety (Gunderson, Park, Maloney,
Beilock, & Levine, 2017), as well as achievement and read-
ing anxiety (Ramirez, Fries, et al., 2017). These studies
suggest that early math anxiety is capable of derailing sub-
sequent performance (in line with a Disruption Account).
Poor math achievement, however, appears to be a pro-
nounced cause of later math anxiety (in line with a poor
math skills view). Once again, these results show that low
achievement comes first, but they cannot provide an ade-
quate account for how low achievement leads to math
anxiety.
Genetic Predispositions
In 2014, Wang and colleagues published the first (and to
our knowledge, the only) empirical research study that
sought to answer the question of how genetics contribute to
math anxiety. The researchers examined math anxiety in a
group of twin adolescent siblings and found that genetic
factors accounted for approximately 40% of the variation in
math anxiety, with child-specific environmental factors
accounting for the remaining variation. Wang et al. (2014)
posited that math anxiety is influenced by both genetic and
nonfamilial environmental risk factors that are also associ-
ated with general anxiety, as well as additional independent
genetic influences that are associated with math ability.
Although these findings underline the important role that
genes may play in a student’s susceptibility to math anxi-
ety, equally important to understand are the varying socio-
environmental factors that can pair with such genes to
cause or exacerbate math anxiety.
Socioenvironmental Factors
A rich literature examining the social and environmental
factors of math anxiety has been under investigation for
some time now. This body of work looks to students’ expe-
riences inside and outside of the classroom as an important
determinant in the development of math anxiety.
Home experiences around math. Parents are often
children’s first educators and a stable source of educational
support outside of the classroom. Parents are commonly
encouraged to become involved in their child’s education
by talking about school, supervising homework completion,
and holding high expectations of academic success.
Although the efficacy of parental involvement in math
shows mixed evidence (H. Cooper, Lindsay, & Nye, 2000;
Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2001; Patall, Cooper, & Robinson,
2008), one recent study asked if parental involvement
might predict children’s math achievement through a reduc-
tion in children’s math anxiety (Vukovic, Roberts, & Green
Wright, 2013). To test this hypothesis, researchers mea-
sured children’s math performance and anxiety as well as
parental involvement using a self-report survey. The results
indicated that holding high parental expectations and
providing strong support at home was associated with a
reduction in children’s math anxiety, which in turn relates
to higher math achievement. However, interpretation of the
results of this study has three important caveats: (a) These
effects were reported at a single time point rather than lon-
gitudinally, (b) none of the other parent involvement factors
(i.e., direct support with homework, communicating with
child’s teacher, homework understanding, etc.) predicted
children’s math achievement, and (c) the researchers did
not measure the parents’ own levels of math anxiety.
In a recent study of the intergenerational transmission of
math anxiety, Maloney et al. (2015) theorized that math-
anxious parents can put their children at risk for developing
math anxiety when they help their children with their home-
work. Studying families of children in first and second
grade, Maloney et al. (2015) found that for higher-math-
anxious parents, more frequent help with math homework
lead to increased math anxiety by the end of the school year
compared to children who received less homework help
from their anxious parents or children who received help
from nonanxious parents. However, see Jameson (2014),
who did not find a parent-to-child math anxiety relation at a
single time point.
The results of this study raise an interesting question:
Why are higher-math-anxious parents leading children to
develop math anxiety when they get more involved with
their homework? One possibility is that these frequent
interactions create opportunities for parents to express their
beliefs about math (i.e., “Math is so confusing”) or their
own experiences around math (e.g., “I was always scared of
math”), which normalizes a fear of math. Another possibil-
ity is that parents provide math problem-solving strategies
that differ from those used by their teachers, which confuse
children and leads to reduced math competency and higher
math anxiety. Whatever the case, these results warrant
parents to be mindful of the messages they may be convey-
ing during their math homework interactions.
Although it is true that parents provide the genes and
often the home environment (Wang et al., 2014), it is
MATH ANXIETY 149
important to note that the Maloney et al. (2015) findings
cannot easily be explained by a genetic account. Indeed,
parents’ math anxiety impacted their children’s math anxi-
ety and math learning, but only when those parents fre-
quently helped their child with their math homework.
When the parents did not help their child with their math
homework, the parents’ math anxiety was unrelated to their
child’s math anxiety or math learning. Although there is
certainly a genetic component to math anxiety and math
achievement, we do not know of any research suggesting a
genetic component to one’s propensity to help with
homework.
In a related study, Berkowitz et al. (2015) investigated
whether scaffolding parent–child interactions could
improve math achievement. Participant families with early
elementary school children received iPads with an app that
structured interactions with math to increase input quality,
and they were asked to use the app weekly during the
upcoming school year. For children of higher-math-anxious
parents, use of the app at least once per week lead to
increased gains over the school year compared to children
of math-anxious parents who used a reading app (control).
These data indicate that through interactions that are struc-
tured to be conducive to learning, we can reduce the nega-
tive impact of parents’ math anxiety on their homework
help.
Negative math-related class experiences. Students
build the majority of their math knowledge in the class-
room, and oftentimes their first interactions with formal
math begin with their teachers. Unfortunately, elementary
teachers report particularly high levels of math anxiety
(Battista, 1986; Bryant, 2009; Hembree, 1990), which
potentially impacts how both teachers and students feel and
perform in math. In fact, interviews and focus groups with
math anxious adults (Chapline, 1980; Chavez & Widmer,
1982; Markovits, 2011) consistently link the development
of math anxiety to negative experiences with elementary
school teachers. A common theme across studies is that
teachers’ math anxiety contributes to children’s math anxi-
ety through their use of particular pedagogical practices
(Allen, 2001; Chapline, 1980; Chavez & Widmer, 1982;
Markovits, 2011), such as overemphasizing rote learning
instead of more conceptual activities (Trujillo & Hadfield,
1999; Vinson, 2001) or presenting lessons in a more dog-
matic manner (Ball, 1990). Research has shown that teach-
ers who are low in math self-concept (i.e., those who
believe themselves to be bad at math) report using text-
book-based approaches and are less likely to rely on alter-
native teaching strategies than teachers high in math self-
concept (Relich, 1996).
Another theme in this literature is that math anxiety
makes it difficult for teachers to feel efficacious in their
teaching responsibilities (Bursal & Paznokas, 2006;
Gresham, 2008; Swars, Daane, & Geisen, 2006), which can
lead to hostile reactions to students’ own difficulties with
math. For example, some adults report that they developed
math anxiety because a teacher in their past responded
angrily when they asked for help or seemed insensitive
toward their struggle with math (Jackson & Leffingwell,
1999). There is a large body of narrative evidence support-
ing the idea that early negative experiences with teachers
contribute to the development of math anxiety (Bulmahn &
Young, 1982; Furner & Berman, 2005; Bryant, 2009; Kelly
& Tomhave, 1985; Larson, 1983; M. Lazarus, 1974;
Martinez, 1987; Ring, Pape, & Tittle, 2000; Sloan, Daane,
& Giesen, 2002; Swetman, 1994; Tobias, 1981; Vinson,
2001). Here, a math-anxious teacher provides a particularly
compelling account:
One day I was teaching a concept and literally cried in front
of my kids because I didn’t get it either. When I expressed
my disdain towards mathematics and my students witnessed
my meltdown they immediately shut down and I lost them
during math lessons for weeks afterwards. I know that see-
ing their teacher get frustrated with the math left a long last-
ing if not lifelong impression on them. (Gresham, 2017, p.
8)
In addition to this narrative evidence, a small number of
quantitative studies have attempted to directly measure the
relation between teachers’ math anxiety and students’ math
outcomes. For example, Beilock et al. (2010) assessed
math anxiety in first- and second-grade teachers as well as
the math achievement and gender stereotype endorsement
of the students in these teachers’ classrooms. By the end of
the school year, higher math anxiety in teachers was associ-
ated with both lower math achievement and higher stereo-
type endorsement (e.g., “Boys are good at math, and girls
are good at reading”) in their female students but not their
male students. Further, female student’s stereotype
endorsement was found to mediate the relation between
female teachers’ math anxiety and their female student’s
math achievement. These data have often been used to sup-
port the claim that a teacher’s math anxiety relates to
students’ own math anxiety. However, it is important to
highlight that this study provided evidence for a relation
between teacher math anxiety and students’ ability beliefs
(but not student math anxiety, which was not reported).
A similar finding was reported in a more recent study by
Ramirez, Hooper, Kersting, Ferguson, and Yeager (2018),
who found that higher levels of math anxiety among ninth-
grade teachers (who are considered to be more specialized
in math compared to elementary school teachers) was asso-
ciated with lower math achievement among their students.
The researchers hypothesized that this relation was medi-
ated by students’ perceptions of what their teacher believes
about math. To assess this, the researchers asked students
to rate how much they felt their teachers engaged in fixed-
oriented teaching practices (i.e., My math teacher wants us
150 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
to memorize things rather than use our thinking skills). As
predicted, the researchers found that students’ perceptions
of their teacher’s fixed mind-set beliefs explained the rela-
tion between teachers’ math anxiety and student math
achievement, above and beyond students’ own mind-sets.
In addition, students who had a higher-math-anxious
teacher were more likely to perceive that their teacher
employs fixed-oriented teaching practices. Such percep-
tions may lead students to believe that their teachers do not
believe everyone is capable of learning math.
In addition to understanding the relation between math
anxiety and teachers’ mind-sets, it is also helpful to under-
stand how math anxiety relates to teaching practices. Bush
(1989) took a longitudinal assessment of pedagogical prac-
tices and student attitudes in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade
classrooms with teachers who had higher versus lower
math anxiety. Bush found that teacher math anxiety was
positively related to time spent on whole-class discussion
and negatively related to number of questions asked by stu-
dents. These results are consistent with the idea that
teachers’ attitudes impact their pedagogical practices,
which in turn can impact their students’ own attitudes,
beliefs, and the manner in which they engage with math in
the classroom.
Previous research suggests that math-anxious teachers
also have lower expectations for student’s math achieve-
ment (Mizala, Martinez, & Martinez, 2015). This is espe-
cially important to note, as students can pick up social cues
from their teachers and make meaningful inferences about
their potential for academic success (Ambady & Gray,
2002; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993; J. E. Eccles, Adler, &
Kaczala, 1982; Keller, 2001). Put differently, students are
interpreting what they witness in the classroom and forming
a story about the domain of math, their teachers, and them-
selves. We expand on this Interpretation Account next.
Interpretation Account
The various accounts explaining why individuals might
develop math anxiety have been helpful in generating
important programs of research. One shortcoming of these
accounts, however, is that they do not explain why poor
math abilities or negative learning experiences necessarily
lead to math anxiety. After all, many students receive lower
grades in math or learn under the same teachers as anxious
students, and yet these students do not end up developing
math anxiety. Conversely, we also find that there are many
students who are both high achievers in math and highly
math anxious (Lee, 2009). To reconcile this, we propose a
novel Interpretation Account of how math anxiety develops
and demonstrate how this new framework allows us to
resolve some seemingly contradictory findings in the
literature.
We draw from a large and disparate body of research to
argue that students’ development of math anxiety is largely
determined by how they interpret (i.e., appraise) previous
math experiences and outcomes (rather than the outcomes
themselves). That is, math anxiety derives not just from a
student’s avoidance tendencies, reduced competency, or
performance worries that shape the development of math
anxiety but rather how individuals interpret their math-
related experiences.
Our Interpretation Account stems from existing
appraisal theory (Arnold, 1950; Barrett, 2006; R. S.
Lazarus, 1991; Schacter & Singer, 1962) and an attitude-
as-constructions view (Bem, 1972; Chaiken & Yates, 1985;
Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000), which argues that
emotional outcomes and attitudes are based on the interpre-
tation of events, physiological cues, personal behavior, and
internal states. In fact, the basic tenet that changing mal-
adaptive thoughts and beliefs shapes affective reactions is
one of the pillars underlying the effectiveness of cognitive
behavioral therapy for treating anxiety disorders (Butler,
Chapman, Forman, & Beck, 2006; Deacon & Abramowitz,
2004; Olatunji, Cisler, & Deacon, 2010). More recently we
have seen an application of appraisal theory toward the
interpretation of more commonplace stress (Blascovich &
Mendes, 2010; Jamieson, Mendes, & Nock, 2013), health
(Idler & Kasl, 1991; Kaplan & Camacho, 1983), and broad
emotion regulation (Kross & Ayduk, 2011; Ochsner &
Gross, 2008). Considering the long-standing tradition of the
application of appraisal theory to the interpretation of stress
and emotions, it is surprising that this perspective has not
been extensively discussed in the math anxiety literature
before now.
Evidence for an interpretation account. We begin
our review of evidence supporting our Interpretation
Account by reviewing research by Meece et al. (1990).
This study investigated how children’s interpretation of
math skills leads to the development of math anxiety in a
sample of students from seventh through ninth grade.
Meece et al. collected the math grades of students during
middle school and assessed whether students’ grades during
their 1st year in the study related to their own perceived
math ability, how important math is to them, and their
expectations for success in math next year. The researchers
then measured how much math anxiety students reported
during the 2nd year of the study.
Their results showed that students’ perceptions of their
math ability at Year 1 (but not their actual math grade in
Year 1) had a direct effect on Year 2 math anxiety.
Students’ perceived ability at Year 1 also indirectly pre-
dicted Year 2 math anxiety through a change in Year 2 suc-
cess expectations and Year 2 ratings of how important math
is. Thus, it seems that the interpretation that students
choose to take about their performance in math, and not
their actual prior achievement in math classes, is the stron-
gest predictor of their subsequent math anxiety. Similar
findings have been found in the domain of health outcomes;
MATH ANXIETY 151
for example, Idler and Benyamini (1997) conducted a meta-
analysis of 27 studies and found that how individuals per-
ceived their health was a significant indicator of mortality,
oftentimes even more predictive than actual health out-
comes (see also Kaplan & Camacho, 1983).
The results of Meece et al. (1990) help explain other
research findings as well. For instance, we previously sum-
marized several studies (Gunderson et al., 2017; Ma & Xu,
2004; Ramirez, Fries, et al., 2017) showing that early
achievement has a much stronger effect on later anxiety,
relative to the effect that early anxiety has on later achieve-
ment. One reason that early achievement is a strong predic-
tor of later math anxiety is that students may view their
math performance as a means of assessing their ability to
be successful in math, which subsequently can create a fear
of math (Meece et al., 1990). Students who apply maladap-
tive appraisals or attribute poor math grades to ability may
be more likely to develop math anxiety, as opposed to those
who attribute it to a lack of effort or who acknowledge that
math is a difficult subject for most students and mistakes
are necessary for learning.
Research examining the relation between self-concept
and math anxiety provides additional support for our Inter-
pretation Account. Work by Jameson (2014) found that
math self-concept in second-grade children was a stronger
predictor of math anxiety than parent math anxiety, child
gender, and home math activity (see also Ferla, Valcke, &
Cai, 2009; Lee, 2009). Work from Ahmed, Minnaert,
Kuyper, and van der Werf (2012) attempted to answer an
important follow-up question: Which comes first, poor self-
concept of ability or math anxiety? They took measures of
math anxiety and math self-concept at different time points
during the seventh grade, and a cross-lagged panel analysis
revealed a bidirectional relation between math self-concept
and math anxiety. However, the effect of lower self-concept
on math anxiety was twice as strong as the effect of math
anxiety on self-concept. The authors suggest that the path
from math self-concept to math anxiety may be more pow-
erful because students can develop “dysfunctional self-
schemas” of themselves that negatively affected the
appraisal of their own ability to do well in math (Ahmed
et al., 2012).
Jain and Dowson (2009) investigated how self-regula-
tion and self-efficacy predict math anxiety in a diverse sam-
ple of eighth-grade students. Results showed that lower
self-regulatory processes in students led to lower perception
of personal competence, which led to an increase in math
anxiety. The authors suggest that students with a lower per-
ception of personal competence may have difficulty shrug-
ging off previous difficulties with math (e.g., “I didn’t do
so well in my last math class. I am just not comfortable
around math”), which predisposes them to fear subsequent
situations that involve math. Thus, giving students’ adap-
tive appraisals via high self-efficacy, math self-concept, or
an effort-based view of math intelligence, may be an
important factor in helping to redirect students away from
taking on a maladaptive interpretation of their math
experiences.
If our Interpretation Account is correct, then students
who naturally redirect their appraisal in a more positive-
adaptive way could overcome their negative responses
associated with math anxiety. Consistent with this idea,
Lyons and Beilock (2012a) posited that college students
who are high-math-anxious but also high performing
may be reappraising, or reinterpreting, their arousal
while in math-learning and math-testing situations. This
hypothesis was supported by a neuroimaging study in
which Lyons and Beilock (2012a) had higher- and
lower-math-anxious undergraduate college students per-
formamathtaskblockandaverbaltaskblockthatwas
matched in difficulty. Before each problem set, students
saw a cue that indicated whether the next set of trials
was going to be a math set or a word set. Showing the
cue in advance allowed the researchers to separate the
neural activity associated with the anticipation of doing
a math problem from the neural activity associated with
actually doing math calculations.
Lyons and Beilock (2012a) found that during the time
between being cued for an upcoming math trial and actually
completing the problems, higher-performing math-anxious
undergraduates showed increased activation of a frontopar-
ietal network that is known to be involved in the control of
negative emotions. Lower-math-anxious students did not
show this increased activation. Not surprising, results
showed that the more activation the higher-math-anxious
individuals showed in this frontoparietal network before
the math task, the better they performed. The authors sug-
gest that successful higher-math-anxious participants may
be recruiting these frontoparietal regions to engage in reap-
praisal before they begin the math task.
Appraisal processing that takes places before, during,
and after a student does math may be key to explaining
what causes math anxiety, as well who is vulnerable to its
effects. But what factors affect a student’s ability to suc-
cessfully reappraise? The answer may lie within a student’s
motivation. In a 2015 study, Wang et al. asked whether
intrinsic math motivation among adolescents and adults
moderated the relation between math anxiety and math
achievement. Wang et al. (2015) found that adolescents
with lower intrinsic math motivation showed the well-docu-
mented negative relation between math anxiety and math
performance. Yet, for adolescent students with higher lev-
els of math motivation, higher levels of math anxiety were
initially associated with better performance, but as anxiety
increased, performance began to drop off at the highest lev-
els of math anxiety (in essence, they demonstrated an
inverted-U function). These results suggest that students
with low intrinsic motivation may not use positive appraisal
processes to regulate their emotional experience, and they
instead succumb to the negative thoughts and worries that
152 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
disrupt working memory. For those with high intrinsic math
motivation, however, a moderate amount of math anxiety
was associated with optimal performance, perhaps because
these students felt a drive to do well in math despite their
anxious response.
The pattern of results outlined so far suggest that provid-
ing math-anxious students with appropriate appraisal cues
and meaning-making frameworks may help them overcome
their otherwise maladaptive appraisal of disfluent math
experiences. In the absence of high motivation for posi-
tively appraising a situation, it may be quite difficult for
students to take on a more adaptive interpretation of their
anxiety around math. This is because physiological experi-
ences such as heightened arousal and sweaty palms are
commonly understood as sign of probable failure, making it
difficult for math anxious students to reappraise their math
experience.
A clear example of this notion comes from Mattarella-
Micke et al. (2011), who theorized that for students low in
math anxiety, a heightened physiological reaction (i.e.,
sweaty palms, racing heart) could be interpreted as a cue
that they are in a challenging situation, which might
enhance performance (see Jamieson, Nock, & Mendes’s,
2012, work on challenge vs. threat). In contrast, for students
who are high in math anxiety, a heightened physiological
reaction may be interpreted as math-related distress, which
could lead to worries and underperformance. Data from
Mattarella-Micke and colleagues showed that an increase
in the concentration of cortisol (a marker of physiological
arousal) was positively associated with math performance
for lower-math-anxious students. In contrast, an increase in
the concentration of cortisol was negatively associated with
math performance for those higher in math anxiety. That is,
individuals’ attitudes toward math are not just a product of
their interpretation of past events but also their interpreta-
tion of physiological responses in the moment. Research by
Mattarella-Micke and colleagues suggests that, just as reap-
praisal of past math experiences can affect the development
of math anxiety, moment-to-moment appraisals of physio-
logical cues can modulate the extent to which math anxiety
impacts performance.
A major premise of our Interpretation Account is that
students play an active role in creating meaning of their
educational experiences, and one of the ways they do this is
by seeing the world through an interpretative lens that is
shaped by an internal narrative. The notion that students
apply ongoing narratives toward better understanding them-
selves and past educational experiences resonates with sev-
eral theories implicating a “storytelling self” (Baumeister
& Newman, 1994; Wilson, 2011) or “narrative identity”
(McAdams, 2001; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007).
There is even a growing body of work on narrative under-
standings of math development and “story” experiences
around math (I. Carter, 1993; K. Carter & Stoehr, 2011).
Students engage with internal narratives to gain a sense
of stability, unity, and purpose, as well as to maintain an
overarching narrative of the self’s adequacy (i.e., “I am
generally a good student, but math is something that just
freaks me out”). Unfortunately, some students impose mal-
adaptive interpretative narratives toward their disfluent
math experiences, which can create a self-fulling prophecy.
Maladaptive interpretations can redirect students to view
both past experiences (Woike & Polo, 2001) and ongoing
and future events (Sherman & Cohen, 2006) in a manner
that is consistent with the narrative they choose to tell. This
would help to explain why math anxiety is often associated
with ruminations (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001).
This is not to say that the nature of the student’s interpre-
tation is unaffected by external factors. When viewing some
of the previously discussed studies from an interpretation
account, it is clear that the appraisals that students adopt
may be heavily shaped by their social environments. Some
external influences that shape appraisals include the
following:
Existing cultural stereotypes (i.e., “Women hate math,
so I must hate math as well”; Bieg et al., 2015).
Societal beliefs around disfluent learning (i.e., “If you
are having trouble learning something, then you are
probably not going to perform very well”; Benjamin,
Bjork, & Schwartz, 1998; Koriat & Bjork, 2006;
Stigler & Hiebert, 2004).
Social interactions in the home (“My parents always
help me with math homework because I am not very
comfortable doing it on my own”; Maloney et al.,
2015).
Social interactions in class (“My teacher gets really
stressed out teaching math”; Beilock et al., 2010).
Teaching pedagogy (“My teacher doesn’t ask us ques-
tions or encourage us to think deeply about math
because he/she believes that not everyone can be
good at math”; Ramirez et al., 2018).
Lay beliefs about the meaning of heightened physio-
logical arousal (i.e., “My heart is beating fast, I must
be really nervous”; Jamieson et al., 2012).
To expand on one example, we return to the study by
Maloney et al. (2015) that showed that higher frequency of
homework help among math-anxious parents was associ-
ated with reduced math growth as well as heightened math
anxiety across the school year. One account for this result
is that parents are confusing students with alternative prob-
lem-solving strategies. However, another possibility is that
children interpret the frequent help from parents as a sign
that perhaps their parents think they are bad at math or that
math is something to fear. Previous work finds that parents
who provide more uninvited help can lead children to adopt
lower perceptions of their math ability (Bhanot &
MATH ANXIETY 153
Jovanovic, 2005; Pomerantz & Ruble, 1998), which is pre-
dictive of higher math anxiety.
In summary, we have presented a novel Interpretation
Account for why students may develop math anxiety. This
account argues that maladaptive interpretations of ongoing
and previous math experiences are a key factor in determin-
ing who develops math anxiety and whose performance
suffers as a function of math anxiety. Our Interpretation
Account provides a retelling of previous research and helps
synthesize disparate research findings. Viewing the math
anxiety literature from this Interpretation Account may pro-
vide us with important clues about the additional factors
that moderate the development, growth, and impact of math
anxiety, as well as ways to remediate math anxiety once it
has already taken hold—issues we return to later in the
article.
WHO IS IMPACTED BY MATH ANXIETY?
Up until now, we have primarily discussed math-anxious
students in terms of general trends. It is clear, however, that
there are various populations who are particularly vulnera-
ble to the effects of math anxiety. There also exist several
demographic factors that moderate the magnitude of the
math anxiety–achievement relation, which we discuss in
greater detail next.
Math Anxiety and Gender
Many studies have reported higher levels of math anxiety
for women than for men (e.g., Ashcraft & Faust, 1994;
Baloglu & Kocak, 2006; Bernstein, 1992; Betz, 1978;
Else-Quest, Hyde, & Linn, 2010; Hembree, 1990; Hopko,
Mahadevan, Bare, & Hunt, 2003; Hopko et al., 2003; Ma &
Cartwright, 2003; Wigfield & Meece, 1988). Other studies,
however, have failed to find such a gender difference
(e.g., S. E. Cooper & Robinson, 1991; Hackett, 1985).
Nonetheless, when examining math anxiety on a large
scale, it does appear that there are gender differences. One
study by Stoet, Bailey, Moore, and Geary (2016) measured
math anxiety among 761,655 high school students across
68 nations who participated in PISA. The researchers found
that female participants reported more math anxiety than
male participants overall, and the math anxiety and gender
gap widened as the country increased in economic
development.
To date, there has been no definitive answer to the ques-
tion of why women are more likely to be more math anxious
than men. However, a few hypotheses have been put forth.
For example, Maloney et al. (2011) demonstrated that the
gender difference in math anxiety is mediated by spatial-
processing ability. In other words, women may be more
math anxious than men, on average, because women are
worse at spatial processing than men (and spatial processing
is an integral part of mathematics; e.g., Cheng & Mix,
2014). That said, Ashcraft and colleagues speculated that the
gender difference in math anxiety may occur because
women are more comfortable reporting anxiety (e.g.,
Ashcraft, 2002). Alternatively, Beilock, Rydell, and
McConnell (2007) suggested that the gender difference is
the result of the social stereotype that women are worse at
math compared to men. Additional evidence supporting this
social stereotype account comes from Goetz et al. (2013),
who asked male and female students from Grades 5 through
11 to report their trait-level math anxiety using a question-
naire outside of class. They found that girls do, in fact, self-
report higher math anxiety than boys. However, when stu-
dents were probed about their real-time math anxiety
directly before and during a math exam, girls did not report
more anxiety symptoms than boys. Follow-up research
revealed that this discrepancy between trait and state math
anxiety was larger among students with a low math self-con-
cept and those who endorsed traditional gender stereotype of
math traditionally being a male dominant field (Bieg et al.,
2015). In line with our Interpretation Account, these results
suggest that stereotyped beliefs about how women should
feel about math (rather than actual ability) may explain the
observed gender difference in math anxiety.
MATH ANXIETY IN EARLY DEVELOPMENT
The majority of math anxiety research has been conducted
among college student populations, but recently there has
been a strong interest in studying math anxiety at the ele-
mentary school level. This shift has been dramatic, as
researchers believed for a long time that the onset of math
anxiety began around sixth grade, despite the qualitative
reports from adults that the cause of their math anxiety had
been earlier math experiences (Jackson & Leffingwell,
1999). Part of the lack of interest in studying math anxiety
early in development could have stemmed from several
studies reporting no consistent relation between math
anxiety and performance in elementary school (Dowker,
Bennett, & Smith, 2012; Krinzinger, Kaufmann, & Willmes,
2009), which may have led some researchers to question
whether young children experienced math anxiety or if they
were adequately capable of describing how they felt. For
some time, there has been an interesting discussion around
whether children have the cognitive sophistication to ade-
quately report their feelings about math anxiety (Ashcraft &
Krause, 2007; Ganley & McGraw, 2016; Vukovic, Kieffer,
et al., 2013). Despite some of the aforementioned miscon-
ceptions, researchers have now amassed a growing body of
workfocusedonstudyingmathanxietyataveryyoungage.
A review of this work reveals the following:
1. Young children are, in fact, capable of understanding
and reporting their feelings of anxiety toward math.
154 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
Several studies conducted pilot tests and cognitive
interviews in which children demonstrate a good
understanding of what it means to be nervous, anx-
ious, or tense about math (Ganley & McGraw, 2016;
Ramirez et al., 2013; Vukovic, Kieffer, et al., 2013).
2. Even children at the very start of formal schooling
report experiencing math anxiety. A number of stud-
ies have reported reliable evidence that first graders
experience math-specific anxiety (Aarnos & Perkkil€
a,
2012; Ramirez et al., 2016; Ramirez et al., 2013;
Thomas & Dowker, 2000).
3. Higher math anxiety is inversely linked with lower
performance on various math performance indices,
such as achievement test scores from school records
(Gierl & Bisanz, 1995), standardized achievement
batteries (Jameson, 2014; Ramirez et al., 2016;
Ramirez et al., 2013; Wu, Barth, Amin, Malcarne, &
Menon, 2012), tasks examining whole-number com-
putation skills and math concepts (Harari, Vukovic,
& Bailey, 2013), as well as mathematical applica-
tions (Vukovic, Kieffer, et al., 2013).
4. WM is an important construct underlying the relation
between math anxiety and performance. Some stud-
ies have focused on the mediating role of WM-
related brain processes (Young et al., 2012), whereas
others examined WM as a moderator (Ramirez et al.,
2016; Vukovic, Kieffer, et al., 2013) or investigated
the WM demands of the specific task at hand
(Ramirez et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2012).
This more recent interest in studying math anxiety in
younger populations has led to a number of instruments for
assessing individual differences in math anxiety (for an
excellent review of the existing scales for measuring math
anxiety, see Eden, Heine, & Jacobs, 2013, and Ganley &
McGraw, 2016). Some of these instruments ask children to
respond by selecting a series of cartoon faces (Jameson,
2013; Krinzinger et al., 2009; Ramirez et al., 2013;
Thomas & Dowker, 2000; Wu et al., 2017), whereas others
require children to select from a short list of verbal
responses (Ganley & McGraw, 2016; Harari et al., 2013;
Vukovic, Kieffer, et al., 2013).
Math Anxiety Across Age
Although interest in early math anxiety has recently
peaked, there has been a continuous interest in understand-
ing the developmental trajectory of math anxiety for some
time. Understanding the trajectory of math anxiety has the
potential to address whether math anxiety builds across an
accumulation of negative schooling experiences (Ashcraft
& Faust, 1994) or is instead concentrated across particular
schooling periods (e.g., adolescence), which might high-
light important points for remediation. Unfortunately, as of
now we are unaware of a well-powered study that has
examined changes in math anxiety in K-12. However, in
this next section we attempt to approximate the develop-
mental trajectory of math anxiety by reviewing studies that
have largely taken a cross-sectional approach to examining
trends of math anxiety prevalence.
One of the most extensive studies investigating the trajec-
tory of math anxiety came from Hembree’s (1990) meta-
analysis, which looked at math anxiety from sixth grade
to college. This meta-analysis summarized dozens of cross-
sectional studies and reported that math anxiety is least prev-
alent in sixth grade and peaks at around ninth grade before
leveling off in subsequent years. Wigfield and Meece (1988)
found a similar pattern of results in their study examining
math anxiety from middle school to high school. Wigfield
and Meece found that math anxiety was the lowest in sixth
grade, highest in ninth grade, and leveled off in later years.
From these results, the beginning of high school appears to
be a particularly important educational period for children’s
development of math anxiety.
Other reports, however, have found a different pattern.
Suinn and Edwards (1982) examined math anxiety scores
among children from seventh to 12th grade and found that
students reported the highest median math anxiety scores
during seventh grade and then showed a downward trend in
the amount of math anxiety reported from eighth through
12th grade. Other studies that have examined math anxiety
in late elementary through middle school have found that
from fourth to eighth grade, the math anxiety trend follows
an inverted U-shape with a peak around sixth grade (Chiu
& Henry, 1990). Gierl and Bisanz (1995) also reported a
peak in math test anxiety during sixth grade.
At the early elementary school level, we typically find a
downward trend: Several studies examining children’s
math anxiety between first and third grade (Krinzinger
et al., 2009; Ramirez et al., 2016; Ramirez et al., 2013;
Vukovic, Kieffer, et al., 2013) report a reduction in average
math anxiety across school year cohort observed. However,
M. M. Jameson (personal communication, September 13,
2017) reported a peak in third grade (rather than a down-
ward trend) in her study measuring math anxiety from first
to fourth grade (Jameson, 2013). Although these different
results may suggest that math anxiety fluctuates from year
to year, there exist several studies that find no meaningful
difference between years observed. Math anxiety studies
examining children in Grades 4–6 (Suinn, Taylor, &
Edwards, 1988), Grades 4 and 5 (Y€
uksel-¸Sahin, 2008),
Grades 3 and 5 (Dowker et al., 2012), and Grades 1–3
(Ganley & McGraw, 2016; Wu et al., 2012; Young et al.,
2012) report no differences in that math anxiety across
these school grades.
In sum, there is no clear trend across various cross-sec-
tional studies examining math anxiety across different age
groups. It is important to note, however, that due to the
recent reforms in math education, current trends may be
very different from the findings reported by older studies.
MATH ANXIETY 155
In addition, although many of the aforementioned studies
are cross-sectional, they do not support a view that math
anxiety snowballs across time. That is, if math anxiety were
a culmination of negative experiences that became exacer-
bated over time, we would expect children in higher grades
to have more math anxiety. However, that is not what we
generally find.
HOW CAN WE MITIGATE MATH ANXIETY?
Thus far, we have identified different frameworks for
explaining the development and impact of math anxiety.
We have also reviewed findings from studies that collec-
tively suggest that math anxiety is a multifaceted construct
that is created, influenced, and sustained by a variety of
individual-difference factors. As such, the effort to combat
math anxiety has also been diverse in its approach. Next we
review some of the most successful interventions that
reduce math anxiety and/or reduce the negative impact of
math anxiety on achievement. We also highlight areas that
are in current need of additional interventions.
Math Skill and Exposure Interventions
According to the Reduced Competency Account, interven-
tions that aim to improve students’ math skills may also be
effective at reducing math anxiety. Supekar, Iuculano,
Chen, and Menon, (2015) demonstrated that an intensive 8-
week, one-on-one cognitive tutoring program reduces math
anxiety in children. Similar to phobia interventions, the
researchers found that exposure to math could not only
improve math skills but also reduce anxiety through desen-
sitization. Before the intervention, children participated in
fMRI scans, which found that when doing math, higher-
math-anxious students had aberrant neural responses and
connectivity in emotion-related circuits centered in the
amygdala. However, after the 8-week intervention, follow-
up fMRI scans showed that these aberrant neurological
responses disappeared, and there were no differences in
brain activation between higher- and lower-math-anxious
children. Crucially, Supekar et al. found that children with
greater tutoring-induced decreases in amygdala reactivity
had larger reductions in math anxiety. The results of this
study suggest that improving math skills is important to
reducing math anxiety and desensitizing individuals to
math.
The Avoidance framework under the Reduced Compe-
tency Account states that avoidance tendencies may be
responsible for the deficits in development (and explains
why increased exposure is an effective solution). If this is
the case, then there are a number of interesting interven-
tions that could be conducted to increase engagement with
math. For instance, parents who play number-rich board
games at home may reap benefits beyond improving
children’s numerical representation (Laski & Siegler, 2014;
Ramani & Siegler, 2008; Siegler & Ramani, 2008, 2009;
Whyte & Bull, 2008). Use of number-rich board games
may help children to connect math with their everyday lives
(Petersen & Hyde, 2017), model a positive disposition
around math in the home, and desensitize heightened anxi-
ety around math. Although such informal math activities
have been found to increase math skills and interest in
math, as far as we are aware, research linking these activi-
ties to math anxiety has yet to be conducted. The previously
discussed Berkowitz et al. (2015) parent study with iPads
provides one conceptual example for how math activities in
the home can create better outcomes by scaffolding parent–
child interactions around math.
Interpretation Interventions
Our Interpretation Account indicates the importance of
appraisal processes in shaping not only who develops math
anxiety but also whether math-anxious students falter or
thrive during demanding math situations. Games and inter-
active platforms might encourage students to engage with
math more and appraise math as enjoyable. Students may,
however, be unwilling to persist in math if they interpret
struggles as a product of their own inability rather than a
natural part of learning. It is important that students under-
stand that math is not always fun and that there is a lot to
gain from productively struggling and engaging in sense-
making processes around math (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007).
Indeed, one of the most promising avenues of remediation
is work suggesting that, rather than suppressing worries or
avoiding math, it can be effective to encourage individuals
to reappraise their math anxious reaction or embrace the
view that disfluent learning can be useful.
Interpretation of physiological arousal. When stu-
dents are placed in stressful academic situations, many
overcome their affective reaction by viewing the situation
as a challenge that they can overcome rather than as a threat
they should avoid. Such an account is well described by the
biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat (Blascovich
& Mendes, 2010), which argues that situational demands
can be evaluated as threatening when individuals appraise
that they do not have the personal resources (e.g., self-effi-
cacy, motivation, intelligence, knowledge, social support)
to properly address those demands. In contrast, individuals
who appraise that they have personal resources to meet the
situational demands are more likely to view those demands
as a challenge, which facilitates performance.
Recently, research on reappraisal has been extended to
the domain of math anxiety. Jamieson, Peters, Greenwood,
and Altose (2016) looked at the benefits of reappraisal
among community college students enrolled in a remedial
math course. In their experiment, one group of participants
read about how heightened physiological arousal was
156 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
optimal for performance (appraisal condition). Another
group of participants were given standard information
about the benefits of simply ignoring stress during an exam
(control condition). When it came time for their class
exams, students in the appraisal condition showed greater
improvement across exams and reported less math anxiety
compared to control participants.
Another avenue of interventions involves helping stu-
dents to reduce or regulate worries that often guide
their negative appraisals (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). Park,
Ramirez, and Beilock (2014) employed an expressive writ-
ing technique aimed at reducing the number of intrusive
thoughts of math-anxious individuals in order to improve
math performance. Specifically, Park et al. had higher- and
lower-math-anxious adults complete tests of math ability
before and after engaging in an expressive writing exercise,
in which they wrote openly regarding how they felt about
an upcoming math test. After only one session of expressive
writing, the higher-math-anxious participants experienced a
boost in their math performance relative to their pretest
scores, narrowing the performance gap between them and
their lower-math-anxious peers. These results may have
occurred because students who confronted their negative
thoughts and worries gained insights that are not experi-
enced by students who suppressed or avoided their own
concerns. This finding is consistent with some of the most
successful treatments for clinical anxiety disorders (Becker,
Darius, & Schaumberg, 2007; Foa et al., 2005). In fact, we
find from previous meta-analytic results that systematic
desensitization as well as cognitive restructuring are among
the most efficacious treatments for math anxiety (Hembree,
1990).
Narrative and mind-set interventions. The primary
benefits of reappraisal and expressive writing interventions
may lie in giving students an opportunity to make sense of
their ongoing experience, allowing them to edit their ongo-
ing narrative and the resulting appraisal processes
(Baumeister & Newman, 1994; McAdams, 2001; McLean
et al., 2007; Wilson, 2011). However, rather than temporar-
ily change how students appraise the situation, we think a
more useful framework for reducing math anxiety may be
to help students adopt a failure-as-enhancing mind-set
rather than a failure-as-debilitating mind-set.
We highlighted earlier that students’ narratives and
appraisal processes are likely shaped by their social envi-
ronment. In a classic study, Dweck (1975) also provided
evidence that reappraisal of failure as efficacious can help
children with learned helplessness to perform better in
math. In her study, students who showed signs of learned
helplessness were put either on a success track or failure-
reapprasial track. In the success track, any failure that stu-
dents faced during their math performance was either
ignored or glossed over. In the failure-reappraisal condi-
tion, students were forced to fail and informed that it was
because they did not put in enough effort. By the end of the
experimental training, students in the failure-reappraisal
condition not only stopped showing declines in perfor-
mance after failures but also began to show increases in
performance overall. Dweck reasoned that students now
saw failure as a cue to “escalate effort,” and a subset of
children in this condition even reportedly began to verbal-
ize their newly trained attribution after they failed (Dweck,
1975).
Interventions designed to change individuals’ mind-set
(Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) and give stu-
dents a distanced perspective to better appraise stressful sit-
uations (Kross & Ayduk, 2011; Ochsner & Gross, 2008)
can be long-lasting. To build upon this, subsequent research
in this field should examine how to create lasting change in
students’ views of disfluent math learning and the personal
math narratives that they carry with them. Specifically, it
would be helpful for researchers to investigate whether (a)
a failure-as-enhancing mind-set and (b) more effort to reap-
praise failure can have similar long-term benefits in the
domain of math anxiety. Our intuition is that such interven-
tions would work better if they are accompanied by a shift
in the mind-set beliefs of the organization and culture in
which children learn math (i.e., within classes and the
home; Hooper, Yeager, Haimovitz, Wright, & Murphy,
2016; Murphy & Dweck, 2010).
Educators must show, through their everyday interac-
tions with students, that math material can be learned by
everyone and that failure is normal and perhaps even opti-
mal for improving. An example of this idea applied in a
classroom can be found in the research of Lin-Siegler, Ahn,
Chen, Fang, and Luna-Lucero (2016). In their study, they
hypothesized that students who learn about the struggles of
famous scientists might feel more connected to the scien-
tific content they were learning, perhaps because these nar-
ratives helped to normalize failure. This, they reasoned,
would help students to learn more and produce higher
grades. Their results supported the hypothesis: Students
who learned about the struggles and failures of famous sci-
entists (as opposed to learning about the scientists’ achieve-
ments) felt more connected to the content and later showed
higher grades. Furthermore, this effect was especially pro-
nounced in low-performing students. The authors suggested
that because a critical part of science learning is working
through failure, presenting a realistic picture of struggle
may have inspired students to persist in the face of failure.
Similarly, Wilson and Linville (1985) reasoned that
many 1st-year college students view academic struggles as
possible evidence that they do not fit in or have the intelli-
gence to succeed. To test how this mind-set could be
improved, Wilson and Linville designed an intervention in
which students either watched videos about what to expect
during college or received no information. In the videos
shown to the intervention group, current college students
explained that it is common to struggle during the 1st year
MATH ANXIETY 157
of college and that after an adjustment period, things would
get better. The students who experienced this short inter-
vention had higher course grades and retention rates rela-
tive to the control group, suggesting that the messaging
may have helped redirect them toward a more adaptive
interpretation, or “story re-editing,” of the struggles they
suffered during their 1st year of college (Wilson, 2011).
That is, being introduced to struggle and failure as a normal
process allows students to use a more flexible appraisal pro-
cess when they experience failure themselves.
In summary, there have been many promising studies for
the treatment of math anxiety, yet there is much more than
can be done. We view the Interpretation Account frame-
work as an important direction for the next generation of
math anxiety intervention research.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Research on math anxiety has made great progress, leverag-
ing findings from the fields of education, psychology, and
neuroscience to garner a better understanding of its causes,
consequences, and potential remediation. However, there
are many areas in need of research effort, which we
describe next. It is our hope that these areas will be
addressed in future work to improve our understanding
math anxiety.
Flexibility
One issue that should receive greater attention is the role of
math anxiety in the development of flexible strategic think-
ing and conceptual understanding. Much of the earlier work
on math anxiety has focused on using standardized achieve-
ment batteries to examine how math anxiety affects
students’ general memory retrieval and fluency in math.
Even today, a significant portion of the literature is focused
on students’ speed and accuracy at solving basic arithmetic
problems. However, the literature on math anxiety would
be greatly enhanced if it expanded to include the study of
flexibility. Math flexibility describes the ability to flexibly
shift between various strategies and reasoning when doing
math, which is considered a critical skill for solving new
and unfamiliar math problems (National Research Council
& Mathematics Learning Study Committee, 2001). Math
flexibility has been shown to improve both procedural
knowledge and conceptual knowledge (Star et al., 2015)—
expertise that is necessary to learn and perform math suc-
cessfully. Furthermore, flexibility in math is arguably one
of the defining characteristics of the mathematically gifted
(Mann, 2006).
By repeatedly depending on only a few learned strate-
gies, inflexibility impedes more advanced skill develop-
ment, which can in turn influence conceptual understanding
(De Jong & Ferguson-Hessler, 1996; Glaser, 1991).
Unfortunately, there is not enough research to draw any
meaningful conclusions about how math anxiety might
affect a student’s ability to learn and deploy a variety of
problem-solving strategies (see Imbo & Vandierendonck,
2007; Ramirez et al., 2016). However, we encourage
researchers to look at research in the domain of stereotype
threat, which is beginning to develop a rich body of knowl-
edge on the ways in which anxiety affects students’ deploy-
ment of prepotent responses (Jamieson & Harkins, 2007).
Retention
Another important outcome that has received little attention
is the role of math anxiety on retention of mathematics
material across time. Bahrick and Hall (1991) conducted
one of the most extensive investigations into the factors
that predict mathematics retention. Their investigation
found that both subsequent course taking and curriculum
and schedule of instruction were much stronger predictors
of knowledge retention than individual-difference variables
such as aptitude and school grades. Yet math anxiety has,
up to this point, remained relatively uninvestigated as
potential predictor of math knowledge retention. In one
qualitative study, a math anxious adult reflects the
following:
During middle and high school, I know my attitude towards
math was 100% affected by my low test scores. I began to
build a wall towards math and it was, and it still is some-
times tough for me to open up and soak up information.
(Stoehr, 2017, p. 75)
It is common to hear students report that they forgot
everything they learned in math courses soon after finish-
ing. Considering the aversive nature of math courses for
math-anxious students and the role that avoidance plays in
math anxiety, one issue worth addressing is how defensive
reactions modulate the retention of math content. Experien-
ces like the one outlined in the preceding quote have
recently led some researchers to wonder whether stress and
anxiety around math might encourage students to engage in
defensive reactions that intentionally suppress (i.e., forget)
memories for the math they learn—a phenomenon known
as motivated forgetting.
In a field study on motivated forgetting, Ramirez,
McDonough, and Jin (2017) asked whether stressful course
experiences around math might lead to a higher rate of for-
getting once students completed a college course on multi-
variate calculus. To address this question, they measured
individual differences in ongoing stress once a week while
students were taking multivariate calculus. Two weeks after
the course was completed, students were asked to complete
a surprise follow-up exam on the same content covered on
their original final exam.
158 RAMIREZ, SHAW, MALONEY
Ramirez, McDonough, et al. (2017) found that higher
ongoing stress did not relate to how students performed
on the final exam of the class. However, they did find
that students who had reported higher ongoing stress
showed a steeper rate of forgetting, but only for students
who reported a strong math identity. A similar finding
has also been observed among young children (Ramirez,
2017). Students whose identity is strongly tied to math
may have appraised ongoing course stress as a threat to
their identity and engaged in motivated forgetting to
protect the personal image they wanted to maintain. Put
differently, students may have been motivated to edit
out the parts of their life that did not cohere with the
story that they wanted to tell about being “good at
math.” In future work, it is important to address whether
a similar process could also be happening in math-anx-
ious students, such that they dismiss positive math expe-
riences once they have adopted a particularly negative
narrative about their abilities in math.
DIVERSE POPULATIONS
Although the majority of math anxiety research conducted
in higher education has focused on 4-year university stu-
dents, there is much to gain from focusing more on math
anxiety in community college students. Community col-
leges typically serve a greater percentage of low-income,
nontraditional, and minority students than other 4-year uni-
versities (Provasnik & Planty, 2008), and because enroll-
ment is less competitive, community colleges also serve
students with more variability in math skill. In particular,
community colleges traditionally offer more developmental
courses than 4-year universities. Students in these develop-
mental math courses have shown poor math skills (Givvin,
Stigler, & Thompson, 2011; Stigler, Givvin, & Thompson,
2010), which may explain why community college students
overall report higher estimates of math anxiety than stu-
dents at a 4-year university (Yeager, as cited in Chang &
Beilock, 2016). In one recent meta-analysis, Sprute and
Beilock (2016) found that developmental community col-
lege students show more variability in math anxiety than 4-
year university students and that almost half of these stu-
dents experienced moderate to high math anxiety. This
finding highlights developmental community college stu-
dents as one of the highest concentrations of math-anxious
students in all of education—an optimal subpopulation for
study.
As much as the field would benefit from studying math-
anxious students who do not identify strongly with math,
the opposite side of the spectrum is also an important popu-
lation of study—students who are math anxious but also
have strong math identity and math motivation. A large
majority of research thus far has focused on a general sam-
ple of college students and assumed that math anxious
students have low motivation. However, as we have
reviewed throughout this article, math anxious students
sometimes show high achievement and can be math moti-
vated. Work previously mentioned in motivated forgetting,
for example, highlights the necessity to investigate the role
of math anxiety among individuals who are highly identi-
fied with the domain of math, show high math motivation,
or are pursuing a career with heavy math requirements.
CONCLUSIONS
Math anxiety is a phenomenon with a complex etiology and
a host of negative consequences. It impacts all ages, from
young children to older adults, and worldwide it is related
to decreased math achievement and negative attitudes about
math. Here, we have aimed to provide an encompassing
review of the literature to date, drawing on findings from
education, psychology, and neuroscience to highlight the
causes, consequences, and promising interventions of math
anxiety. Along with examining the existing frameworks
that work to explain the causes of math anxiety and its link
to poor performance, we also propose a new Interpretation
Account framework that demonstrates how appraisal can
strongly influence anxiety and performance. By proposing
this new framework in relation to math anxiety, and by out-
lining a number of central unresolved questions, we hope to
help guide future research in this important area.
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