Math anxiety and math achievement in children with intellectual disability

Abstract

Learning math is accompanied by anxiety and fear in some students. For many of them math is a subject they like the least. The goal of this research was to determine the relation between math anxiety and math achievement in students with mild intellectual disability. The sample consisted of 66 students with mild intellectual disability, 13-16 years of age (M=14.5; SD=1.03) of both genders (57.6% of boys and 42.4% of girls), with no neurological and multiple disabilities. We used the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement for the evaluation of numerical, text, and problem tasks. We used Child Math Anxiety Questionnaire for the evaluation of math anxiety. The obtained results indicate that the students were most successful in solving numerical tasks (M=7.45), then text tasks (M=6.11), while the worst achievements were observed in solving problem tasks (M=2.48). Math anxiety in students with mild intellectual disability is increasing with age (t=5.197; p=0.01). Negative statistical correlation was obtained in testing the relationship between math anxiety and numerical (-0.289) tasks, textual (-0.351) and problem (-0.672) tasks.