Effort(less) exam preparation: Math anxiety predicts the avoidance of effortful study strategies

Previous research suggests that math anxiety, or feelings of apprehension about math, leads individuals to engage in math avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their future math performance. However, much of the research on this topic explores global avoidance behaviors in situations where math can be avoided entirely rather than more localized avoidance behaviors that occur within a mathematics context. Since the option to completely avoid math is not common in most formal education systems, we investigated how and if math avoidance behaviors manifest for math-anxious high school students enrolled in math courses. Given previous research highlighting the utility of effortful study strategies as well as recent findings identifying a relation between math anxiety and the avoidance of math-related effort, we hypothesized that math anxiety would be associated with decreased planned engagement of effortful study strategies by students and that such effort avoidance would result in worse performance on a high-stakes mathematics exam. We found (N = 190) that the majority of students ranked problem-solving as the most effortful study strategy and that math anxiety was associated with less planned engagement with effortful problem-solving during studying. Moreover, the avoidance of effortful problem-solving engagement partially mediated the association between math anxiety and exam performance, marking it as a potential target for intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).