Reducing the sex difference in math anxiety: The role of spatial processing ability
Highlights
► Math anxiety is negative affect at math tasks; it disproportionately affects women. ► We tested if controlling for spatial ability reduces the math anxiety sex difference. ► Results indicate controlling for spatial ability eliminated the sex difference. ► Sex differences in math anxiety may result from sex differences in spatial ability.
Section snippets
Participants
One hundred and eighteen (80 female, 38 male) undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo participated in the study in exchange for credit in a psychology class.
Materials
Abbreviated Math Anxiety Questionnaire (AMAS; Hopko, Mahadevan, Bare, & Hunt, 2003). The AMAS is a 9-item questionnaire measuring math anxiety. Total scores range from 9 (not at all math anxious) to 45 (very math anxious). The AMAS has excellent internal consistency (α = .90) and two-week test retest reliability (r = .85; Hopko
Participants
Two hundred and forty nine adults (151 female, 98 male) were recruited online using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (www.MTurk.com; see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011, for a discussion of MTurk and psychological research). The participants ranged in age from 18 to 78 and received a small monetary award in return for their participation.
Measures and procedures
All measures and procedures were the same as Study 1.
Results
Thirty-seven participants skipped one to three items on one or more questionnaires, resulting in 71 missing
General discussion
The results of the present investigation demonstrate that math anxiety is negatively related to spatial processing ability. Importantly, they also demonstrate that the commonly-observed sex difference in math anxiety is not due simply to social stereotypes or to women's willingness to report anxiety. In fact, the sex difference in math anxiety is mediated by spatial processing ability. In other words, women may be more math anxious than men on average because women are worse at spatial
Conclusion
In the present investigation, we have demonstrated evidence that the relation between sex and math anxiety is mediated by spatial processing ability. The results of this study not only help explain why women are more math anxious than men, but also provide insights into potential training techniques which may serve to reduce the sex gap in STEM fields.
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2021, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :Individual VSWMהv ability is a unique predictor of early math achievement, while the other components of WM predicts learning in general (Raghubar et al., 2010). Recently, it has been reported that MA participants display weaknesses in basic numerical abilities, such as number comparison (Dietrich et al., 2015; Georges et al., 2016; Maloney et al., 2011; Maloney et al., 2012) and non-symbolic quantity comparison (Georges et al., 2016). These abnormalities have been linked to spatial weaknesses (Georges et al., 2016; Maloney et al., 2012).