Exploring the influence of basic cognitive skills on the relation between math performance and math anxiety
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
What causes math anxiety? According to a cognitive deficits view, early weaknesses in basic number and spatial skills lead to poor performance and hence negative affect. A strong version of this view suggests that the relation between math anxiety and math performance among adults will be explained by deficits in spatial and basic number skills. In the present research, we tested a model to account for the relations among math anxiety, math performance, and cognitive skills (i.e., working memory, basic number and spatial skills) among adults (N = 90). We replicated the modest correlations observed between math anxiety and these cognitive skills. However, we did not find a direct link between basic number and spatial skills and math anxiety; instead, these relations were mediated by complex math performance. We conclude by rejecting the hypothesis that math anxiety in adults is linked directly to individual differences in spatial and basic numerical skills and suggest instead that the present results are consistent with the alternative view in which even basic numerical tasks, under certain conditions may evoke an anxiety response and mask skill proficiency. Finally, we note that caution should be applied when extrapolating correlational results to make causal claims about whether cognitive skills may be precursors in the development of math anxiety.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it