A small-scale study to identify factors which can influence mathematics anxiety

This research project is a small-scale study to identify factors which can influence mathematics anxiety. The study consisted of 67 participants, between the ages of 11 and 16 years old. They were provided with the modified abbreviated maths anxiety scale (mAMAS), developed by Carey et al. (2017), which is a Likert-style questionnaire, consisting of nine questions. These questions are then split into two subscales: evaluation (test anxiety) and learning (general anxiety). The researcher found that the scores ranged from the lowest value of 9 all the way to the highest possible value of 45, with a mean of 21.51 (SD=7.53). The questions that scored the highest, on average, and laid outside the 95% confidence interval, were identified as all being from the evaluation subscale. Hence, suggesting that levels of test anxiety were greater than that of general anxiety. The questionnaire was then split into the two subscales, where it was established that the mean of the evaluation subscale was significantly greater (2.90), compared to the mean of the learning subscale (1.99). This was reinforced through the interview questions, when over 60% of the interviewees commented that they felt most anxious when they were given a test, especially if they were not previously informed about it. Hence, signifying the importance of identifying mathematics anxiety and finding solutions to reduce it