In the educational field, anxiety towards mathematics has been a recurrent theme that has been intensified with the results of the PISA test of 2012 and 2015. Since students who are anxious about mathematics tend to avoid any area related to mathematics, it leads to a decrease in the number of professionals in mathematics. However, this construct comes from a later history, which is the study of anxiety itself as a psychological and biological phenomenon. For this reason, this work carries out a theoretical revision of those seminal contributions that gave rise to the explanation from the theoretical construct of anxiety for later and in a specific way, to derive in the empirical studies of anxiety towards mathematics.

Anxiety about mathematics is a phenomenon that occurs regardless of age, gender, or area of professional study. This research provides an overview of this phenomenon in Mexico, as experienced by undergraduate students in economics, a science that requires significant use of mathematics. The study is cross-sectional and not experimental and makes use of the ANOVA technique. The results obtained from the application of the Abbreviated Version of the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale (AMARS) to 381 students nationwide provide evidence of the existence of this phenomenon in more than 50% of the sample and indicate differences in terms of gender, region of origin, and type of university.

La ansiedad hacia las matemáticas continúa siendo un tópico de interés en el campo de la educación, por lo que el objetivo de este trabajo consiste en determinar el conjunto de factores que explican la ansiedad hacia las matemáticas en los estudiantes de economía en México. El método es cuantitativo y ocupa el análisis factorial para medir tres factores: ANSIEVAL, ANSIETAR y ANSIECUR, por medio de la AMARS (Alexander and Martray, 1989). Los resultados indican como mayor componente a la dimensión ANSIEVAL con un 26.62%. Una de las limitaciones del estudio fue que se aplicó a 381 estudiantes ya que solo estos aceptaron participar. El hallazgo señala una agrupación distinta de los ítems en las dimensiones ANSIEVAL y ANSIECUR; lo que da valor al estudio, ya que sugiere diferencias en la carga simbólica de la palabra “evaluación” en el estudiante mexicano con respecto del estudiante español y estadounidense.

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