A Cross-national Study of Mathematics Anxiety

Using an international education database, PISA 2012, this study compares 15-year-old students’ mathematics anxiety and its relationships with educational issues among five Asia Pacific economies (Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Shanghai, & Singapore), using descriptive, figural, partial correlative, multiple regressive, and factor analysis methods. The main variable, math anxiety, is made up primarily from six of ten items around student worry, tense, nervousness, or helplessness for mathematics difficulties, homework, tough problems, or poor grades. New findings present a perspective of student math anxiety and its impacts across economies with three different models: math anxiety has strong negative correlations with student standardized test scores, interests, and knowledge of mathematics in all economies; it has reverse relations with student abilities, importance, self-attribution in the high and low achievement economies; and it has weak correlations with teaching methods, parents’ influences, or friends’ performances. This study also discusses a series of questions for further study in mathematics learning.