Undergraduate Students’ Math Anxiety: the Role of Mindset, Achievement Goals, and Parents

The undergraduate college years are a critical time when students are beginning to think seriously about their career interests, and it is critical that students have a positive outlook for their mathematical learning if they are going to pursue math-related STEM majors. The current research with 748 undergraduate math students found that the more they endorsed a fixed mindset, the more they were likely to experience math anxiety, a relationship partially explained by their adoption of mastery-avoidance and performance-avoidance goals. Furthermore, the degree of this mediation effect did not differ for men and women. While women were not more likely to hold a fixed mindset for their math intelligence, they did report higher scores for math anxiety in comparison to men. In addition, if students felt that when they were growing up, their parents were uncomfortable helping them with math homework, it also led to students’ math anxiety, and this was partially explained by influencing students’ fixed mindset beliefs about their math intelligence.