Beliefs, Anxiety, and Avoiding Failure in Mathematics

Abstract EN

Mathematics anxiety has been the subject of several books and numerous research papers, suggesting that it is a significant issue for many people.

Children and adults develop strategies to cope with this anxiety, one of which is avoidance.

This paper presents data taken from over 2500 mathematics test papers in order to compare the levels of accuracy and the frequency of the use of the “no attempt” strategy, that is, avoidance, for arithmetic problems given to children aged from 10 years to adults aged up to 49 years from across the UK.