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In a study of UK children aged 8-11, we investigated the potential negative impact of anxiety on school achievement. In the classroom, children completed the SEMA (Scale of Early Math Anxiety (SEMA) and SCARED (Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders) questionnaires. Their results were compared against their most recent indicators of school achievement. We found significant negative effects of anxiety on females, but not males. Our results related to math and writing are consistent with previous research, although there appears to be little evidence of a gender difference in anxiety on writing achievement. In relation to reading achievement, previous studies demonstrate significant negative effects of anxiety on achievement, but only in males.
Keywords: Gender, anxiety, child, school
A significant proportion of children suffer from anxiety (Polancyzk et al., 2015). Anxiety is a mood state characterized by fear-like symptoms in anticipation of real or imagined future threats (Craske et al., 2009; Furr et al., 2009). Symptoms of anxiety can be somatic (e.g., elevated heart rate), cognitive (e.g., misbeliefs), or emotional (e.g., difficulty in regulating emotion) (Furr et al., 2009). Furthermore, anxiety can have a significant impact on school achievement (Barroso et al., 2020; Namkung et al., 2019; Ramirez et al., 2019; van Mier et al., 2019).
Here, we investigated gender differences among school-aged children on the relation between anxiety and school achievement - focusing on math, reading, and writing. Math anxiety has received far more research attention than reading or writing anxiety. For math, two recent metaanalyses (Barroso et al., 2020; Namkung et al., 2019) found significant inverse correlations between math anxiety and math achievement. Barroso et al. (2020) pointed out that the evidence for gender differences is mixed (some studies show differences and others do not). Van Mier et al. (2019) showed strong gender differences in their study of children (aged 8-10 years) using a math test ("Tempo Test Arithmetic'") and a math anxiety questionnaire ("Child Math Anxiety Questionnaire"), finding a significant negative correlation between math anxiety and math achievement - but only in girls. For reading achievement, Ramirez et al. (2019) found a significant negative correlation (on children aged 6-8 years) between reading anxiety and reading achievement - but only in boys. For writing achievement, girls are often considered to do better than...