Does maths anxiety drain working memory in middle-schoolers?
Children with high maths anxiety did worse than calm peers on maths and on verbal memory tasks, but not on reading or writing.
Source
Mathematics Anxiety, Working Memory, and Mathematics Performance in Secondary-School Children
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Extreme-groups comparison: children screened for maths anxiety, then high- and low-anxiety groups (matched on general anxiety, vocabulary, age, gender) compared on achievement and memory tests; no manipulation.
- N
- N=66 · 34 low-maths-anxiety and 32 high-maths-anxiety children, selected from a screening sample of 135.
- Population
- Middle-school children aged 11-13 at state schools in Northern Italy, without learning or intellectual disabilities.
- Outcome
- Standardised maths achievement subtests, reading comprehension, word reading and spelling, verbal short-term memory (word span), and working memory (listening span recall and intrusion errors).
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What they did
The researchers screened 135 children aged 11-13 in Northern Italy with a short maths-anxiety questionnaire, a general-anxiety questionnaire and a vocabulary test. They then formed a high-maths-anxiety group (scores above 1 SD) and a low-maths-anxiety group, both with average general anxiety and average vocabulary. Both groups took standardised maths, reading and spelling tests, a word-span test of short-term memory, and a listening-span test of working memory that also counted intrusion errors (recalling words that should have been ignored).
What they found
The low-anxiety group outperformed the high-anxiety group by more than 0.5 standard deviation on written calculation, magnitude judgement, logical reasoning and timed fact retrieval, while reading comprehension, word reading and spelling did not differ. The high-anxiety group also recalled fewer words on both memory tasks and made more intrusion errors. Timed fact retrieval and intrusion errors together correctly classified 79.4% of low-anxiety and 68.8% of high-anxiety children.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because groups were selected rather than created, the study cannot say whether anxiety lowers working memory, weak working memory breeds anxiety, or poor maths skill drives both; the authors explicitly say they could not disentangle the direction. The samples are small and from one region, only verbal (not visuospatial) memory was tested, and gender was not analysed even though around 70% of the high-anxiety group were girls. Extreme-group designs can also inflate differences relative to the full range of anxiety.
Key terms
- Maths anxiety
- Feelings of tension, worry and fear specifically when dealing with numbers or maths tasks, distinct from general anxiety.
- Working memory
- A limited-capacity system for holding and manipulating information over a few seconds, used during mental arithmetic and reasoning.
- Attentional control theory
- Eysenck and colleagues' account that worry uses up working-memory resources and weakens attentional control, especially inhibition and shifting.
- Intrusion error
- In a span task, recalling an item that should have been ignored; used here as a sign of weak inhibition of irrelevant information.
- Extreme-groups design
- Selecting participants from the high and low ends of a distribution and comparing them, which boosts power but can exaggerate effects.
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Quiz yourself
What was the key selection criterion that distinguished the two groups?
Common questions
Why did the researchers match the groups on general anxiety?
To show that the differences were tied to maths-specific anxiety rather than to being an anxious child in general.
Why does it matter that reading and spelling did not differ?
It suggests the high-anxiety children were not simply weaker students overall; their difficulty was specific to maths, as a maths-anxiety account predicts.
Does this prove maths anxiety causes poor working memory?
No. The design is correlational, so low working memory or weak maths skill could equally lead to anxiety, and the authors call for longitudinal work.
Why might timed fact retrieval be especially sensitive to maths anxiety?
Time pressure adds stress, and prior work found anxiety effects appear on timed but not untimed versions of the same problems.
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