Strategies for remediating the impact of math anxiety on high school math performance

Students with math anxiety experience excessive levels of negative emotion, including intrusive and distracting thoughts, when attempting to learn about math or complete a math assignment. Consequently, math anxiety is associated with maladaptive study skills, such as avoidance of homework and test preparation, creating significant impediments for students to fulfill their potential in math classes. To combat the impact of math anxiety on academic performance, we introduced two classroom-based interventions across two samples of high school math students: one intervention focused on emotion regulation (ER) using cognitive reappraisal, a technique for reframing an anxious situation, and the other intervention encouraged students to improve their study habits. The Study Skills (SS) intervention was associated with increased grades for highly anxious students during the intervention period, whereas the ER intervention was less efficacious in countering anxiety-related decreases in grade performance. The SS intervention encouraged highly math-anxious students to incorporate self-testing and overcome avoidant behaviors, increasing academic performance and ameliorating performance deficits associated with increased anxiety that were observed in both groups prior to intervention, and that persisted in the ER group. Notably, the benefits observed for the SS group extended to the post-intervention quarter, indicating the potential lasting effects of this intervention. These results support the hypothesis that using better study strategies and encouraging more frequent engagement with math resources would help highly-anxious students habituate to their math anxiety and ameliorate the negative effects of anxiety on performance, ultimately increasing their math comprehension and academic achievement.

Rachel G. Pizzie, David J. M. Kraemer