Psychometric properties of the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS) in Italian primary school children

Abstract

Given the widespread prevalence of mathematics anxiety (MA) and its detrimental long-term impact on academic performance and professional development, it is essential to develop standardized tools capable of identifying MA as early as possible. One of the scales most often used to assess MA is the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS) (Hopko, Mahadevan, Bare, & Hunt, 2003). The first aim of the present study was to validate this tool in a large sample of Italian primary school children, to confirm the factor structure of the AMAS and to develop standardized norms that can be used in the clinical field. Moreover, as the relation between MA and gender has been extensively reported in adult samples, a second goal of the study was to test the invariance of the scale across genders.