The Early Elementary School Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (the EES-AMAS): A New Adapted Version of the AMAS to Measure Math Anxiety in Young Children.

Veronica Guardabassi,Patrick A O’Connor,Maria A Donati,Caterina Primi,Kinga Morsanyi,Viola A Izzo,Carlo Tomasetto

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01014

Abstract

In the past decade, there has been increasing interest in understanding how and when math anxiety (MA) develops. The incidence and effects of MA in primary school children, and its relations with math achievement, have been investigated. Nevertheless, only a few studies have focused on the first years of primary school, highlighting that initial signs of MA may emerge as early as 6 years of age. Nevertheless, there are some issues with measuring MA in young children. One of these is that, although several scales have been recently developed for this age group, the psychometric properties of most of these instruments have not been adequately tested. There is also no agreement in the number and identity of the factors that underlie MA at this young age. Some scales also consist of several items, which make them impractical to use in multivariate studies, which aim at the simultaneous measurement of several constructs. Finally, most scales have been developed and validated in US populations, and it is unclear if they are appropriate to be used in other countries. In order to address these issues, the current studies aimed at developing a short, new instrument to assess MA in early elementary school students, the Early Elementary School Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (the EES-AMAS). This scale is an adapted version of the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS; Hopko et al., 2003), which is one of the most commonly used scales to measure MA and has been shown to be a valid and reliable measure across a number of countries and age groups. The psychometric properties of the new scale have been investigated by taking into account its dimensionality, reliability, and validity. Moreover, the gender invariance of the scale has been verified by showing the measurement equivalence of the scale when administered to male and female pupils. We have also demonstrated the equivalence of the scale across languages (Italian and English). Overall, the findings confirmed the validity and reliability of the new scale in assessing the early signs of math anxiety and in measuring differences between genders and educational contexts. We have also shown that MA was already related to math performance, and teacher’s ratings of children’s math ability at this young age. Additionally, we have found no gender differences in MA in our samples of 6- and 7-year-old children, an important finding, given the strong evidence for gender differences in MA in older age groups.

Highlights

Mathematical proficiency is becoming increasingly important, especially in technological societies, it has been estimated that about 17% of the population (Luttenberger et al, 2018) suffer from more or less severe psychological or physiological symptoms related to feelings of anxiety when confronted with tasks that require the use of numerical information
Math anxiety (MA) has been described as a feeling of tension and anxiety that interferes with the manipulation of numbers in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations (Richardson and Suinn, 1972), and it represents an obstacle to mathematical development
Criteria for assessing overall model fit were mainly based on practical fit measures: the ratio of chi-square to its degrees of freedom (SBχ2/df), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI; Bentler, 1990), the Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI; Tucker and Lewis, 1973), and the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA; Steiger and Lind, 1980)

Summary

Introduction

Mathematical proficiency is becoming increasingly important, especially in technological societies, it has been estimated that about 17% of the population (Luttenberger et al, 2018) suffer from more or less severe psychological or physiological symptoms related to feelings of anxiety when confronted with tasks that require the use of numerical information. Data from the Programme for the International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-old students, reported that 31% stated that they get very nervous when they do math problems (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013). MA has been found to have a negative relationship with mathematics performance and achievement (Hembree, 1990; Ma, 1999). Researchers have reported a consistent, weak to medium negative relationship between math anxiety and performance (ranging from −0.11 to −0.36) indicating that students with higher levels of MA tend to show poorer mathematics performance. Similar to other performance-based anxieties, MA involves psychological arousal, negative cognitions, escape and/or avoidance behaviors and, when the individual cannot avoid the situation, performance deficits. MA is related to reduced cognitive reflection (Morsanyi et al, 2014; Primi et al, 2018), and poorer decision making performance (e.g., Rolison et al, 2016; Rolison et al, 2020)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion