Mathematics Anxiety and Student Achievement: A Mathematical-Statistical Analysis

Source abstract

Students' Mathematics anxiety is one of the most significant affective factors that influence students' performance in Mathematics and other quantitative subjects. The present research is a mathematical-statistical study to investigate the relationship of mathematics anxiety and mathematics achievement. A cross-sectional quantitative design was used, based on an existing public database of 5,000 students. Mathematics anxiety was used as the independent variable, and mathematics achievement was used as the dependent variable. The Pearson correlation coefficient revealed a statistically significant negative correlation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics achievement. Regression analysis also revealed that mathematics anxiety was a statistically significant negative predictor of mathematics achievement, with the model accounting for 19.6% of the variance of mathematics achievement (R² = .196, p < .001). Results for the estimated regression model showed that Mathematics Achievement = 98.869 − 0.453 × Mathematics Anxiety, indicating that higher mathematics anxiety scores were associated with lower mathematics achievement scores. Additionally, the low, moderate, and high anxiety groups were compared for mathematics achievement using one-way ANOVA, which revealed a statistically significant overall difference among the three groups, F(2, 4997) = 820.166, p < .001. Tukey HSD post-hoc comparisons showed statistically significant differences between each pair of anxiety groups (low vs. moderate, low vs. high, and moderate vs. high; all p < .001). Students with low mathematics anxiety had the highest mean achievement scores, while students with high mathematics anxiety had the lowest mean achievement scores. The results overall suggest a consistent statistical relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics achievement that is negative. The study shows that the combination of correlation, regression, and group-comparison methods can present an educational research quantitative model for the anxiety–achievement relationship that can be interpreted.