Development and validation of a mathematics anxiety scale for students

This study developed and validated a Mathematics Anxiety Scale for Students (MASS) that can be used to measure the level of mathematics anxiety that students experience in school settings and help them overcome anxiety and perform better in mathematics achievement. We conducted a series of preliminary analyses and panel reviews to evaluate quality of items initially developed for the MASS. The 65 items that measure four domains of mathematics anxiety (nature of mathematics, learning strategy, test/performance, and environment) were finally selected to constitute the final version of the MASS and were administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,339 Korean middle school and high school students to validate the scale. Psychometric properties including descriptive statistics, reliability measures, factorial structure, and correlations with external criteria were examined to provide validity evidences of the final scale. This study contains a detailed description of the entire process of developing and validating the MASS, including the item-selection procedures and psychometric properties of the scale. We believe that the MASS, developed in this study, provides basic but very essential information for predicting specific factors that can cause such anxiety among students.