The Development and Validation of a Revised Version of the Math Anxiety Scale for Young Children

Abstract

Although there is an extensive amount of research that examines the relation between math anxiety and math performance in adolescents and adults, little work has focused on this relation in young children. Recently more attention has been paid to the early development of math anxiety, and new measures have been created for use with this age group. In the present study, we report on the development and validation of a revised version of the Math Anxiety Scale for Young Children (MASYC; Harari et al., 2013). We conducted cognitive interviews with the 12 MASYC items with nine children and then administered the MASYC and five newly-developed items to 296 first-, second- and third-grade children. Results from cognitive interviews show that three of the items from the original scale were being systematically misinterpreted by young children. We present a revised measure (the MASYC-R) consisting of 13 items (eight original, five newly-developed) that shows strong evidence for reliability and validity. Results also showed that a small, but meaningful, proportion of children at this age show signs of high math anxiety. Validity of the MASYC-R was supported through correlations with a number of other factors, including general anxiety, math performance, and math attitudes. In addition, results suggest that a substantial proportion of the variance in math anxiety can be explained from these other variables together. The findings suggest that the MASYC-R is appropriate for use with young children and can help researchers to answer important questions about the nature and development of math anxiety at this age.

The nature of math anxiety in adults: Prevalence and correlates

“…These findings fall in line with work in adolescence that has shown that math anxiety is negatively associated with math performance across the world, which may have negative implications for STEM career training and success (Foley et al, 2017). These findings replicate and extend the work from younger samples that suggests that math anxiety is distinct, but related, to generalized anxiety and test anxiety (Ashcraft, 2002;Ganley & McGraw, 2016;Hill et al, 2016). There is building work in students that suggests that trait generalized anxiety might be a precursor to math anxiety (Wang et al, 2014), whereas test anxiety, similar to math anxiety, is a state anxiety, perhaps learned through negative schooling experiences (Wood, Hart, Little, & Phillips, 2016).…”

The interplay between affective and cognitive factors in shaping early proficiency in mathematics

“…Teachers' ratings of children's general anxiety were also collected, as adults' observation of children's anxiety in relevant contexts (e.g., at school) were proven to provide a more robust and reliable assessment than the self-reports from children themselves, at least until the age of 8-9 years (e.g., [79]; see [22], for a meta-analysis). To the contrary, math anxiety is a more specific and context-dependent construct, that appears to be reliably and validly assessed through ageappropriate self-report measures even in young children (e.g., [36,97,96,115,117]).…”

“…Contrary to general anxiety, math-specific anxiety appeared to be unrelated with math performance. In this case, past evidence suggests that the lack of relation with performance is not likely to depend on the children's difficulty in answering the scale: Math anxiety is a specific construct that can be contextualized and reliably self-reported even by young children (see [97,96,115,117]; but see [36]). The absence of a significant relation between math anxiety and math performance is consistent with previous studies conducted by using the same measures with 7-year-old children in the same cultural context [18], but inconsistent with those reported by in a different school system.…”

Relationships between attitudes and performance in young children’s mathematics

“…It would be of interest to compare children of different ages, or ideally to follow-up the same children longitudinally, to see whether the relationships between different attitudes change with age. Ganley and McGraw (2016) found that the relationships between different attitudes increased with age. For example, they found that interest in mathematics, but not mathematical self-confidence, predicted mathematics anxiety in a sample of American first-grade children, while both, together with regarding mathematics as important, predicted mathematics anxiety in third grade pupils.…”