Students who experience mathematics anxiety have long been suggested to engage in avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their mathematics performance. However, little is known about how these avoidance behaviors manifest for highly anxious students within the context of a mathematics course. Since the use of effortful study strategies has…

Math anxiety -- negative feelings towards math -- is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. Surprisingly, however, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety- avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this…

A solid foundation in math is important for children's long-term academic success. Many factors influence children's math learning--including the math content students are taught in school, the quality of their instruction, and the math attitudes of students' teachers. Using a large and diverse sample of first-grade students (n = 551), we…

Math anxiety negatively predicts young children's math achievement. While some researchers have suggested that math anxiety may stem from poor math ability, others have argued that math anxiety occurs at all levels of math ability. An important question is whether math anxiety predicts math achievement over and above foundational math skills. We…

Math anxiety negatively predicts young children's math achievement. While some researchers have suggested that math anxiety may stem from poor math ability, others have argued that math anxiety occurs at all levels of math ability. An important question is whether math anxiety predicts math achievement over and above foundational math skills. We…

Math anxiety--negative feelings toward math--is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. However, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety-avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this relationship. We…

School-entry math achievement is a strong predictor of math achievement through high school. We asked whether reciprocal relations among math achievement, math anxiety, and entity motivational frameworks (believing that ability is fixed and a focus on performance) can help explain these persistent individual differences. We assessed 1st and 2nd…

How does the mind work--and especially how does it learn? Teacher's instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves teachers well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on? Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of…

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…

Proficiency in mathematics is a major advantage in industrialised nations. Here we discuss several emotional impediments to mathematics achievement, namely mathematics anxiety and stereotype threat. Synthesising findings from empirical studies in the fields of cognitive, social, and educational psychology, as well as neuroscience, we discuss some…

Two experiments demonstrate how individual differences in working memory (WM) impact the strategies used to solve complex math problems and how consequential testing situations alter strategy use. In Experiment 1, individuals performed multistep math problems under low- or high-pressure conditions and reported their problem-solving strategies.…

In 3 experiments, the authors examined mathematical problem solving performance under pressure. In Experiment 1, pressure harmed performance on only unpracticed problems with heavy working memory demands. In Experiment 2, such high-demand problems were practiced until their answers were directly retrieved from memory. This eliminated choking under…