Gender differences in mathematics, test and social anxiety This title is in 90 pt Verdana.

1. Gender differences in mathematics, test and social anxietyThis title is in 90 pt Verdana. Bailey, Rudolph N. & Montagano, Jeannie K. Department of Educational Counseling and Psychology, Andrews University rbailey@andrews.edu CONCLUSIONS The results support the hypothesis that more girls are anxious than boys. However, this is not as simple as it first appears. When all students are considered girls have higher mean anxiety scores than boys. That is, when the number of significantly anxious students are examined there are more test anxious boys than girls. This means that when we just examine means we might come to the wrong conclusions. It is necessary to examine the anxious students rather than the whole sample. If these results are replicated, it will be necessary to re-examine the available literature to determine whether the conclusions were based on an examination of only the very anxious students or all students. The second conclusion is that we cannot assume that because a student is math anxious she will also be test and socially anxious as well. Although some students scored high in all areas of anxiety this was not true for the majority of students. Researchers should continue to clarify these issues by comparing individual students across areas of anxiety. Teachers and therapists should pay particular attention to these results and help students based on their specific areas of anxiety. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate gender differences within three areas of anxiety – mathematics, test, and social. Mathematics anxiety is typically viewed as a gender-specific issue with females afflicted more often than males. Indeed, research suggests that girls manifest significantly more mathematics anxiety than do boys in the United States (Hembree,, 1988;1990;Ho et al, 2000; Hyde, Fennema, Ryan, Frost, & Hopp, 1990; Malinsky, 2006). Others have found that gender has no relationship to students’ levels of anxiety (Ikegulu, 1998; Haynes, Mullins, & Stein, 2004). An interesting study by Ho, et al (2000) compared mathematics anxiety among Taiwanese , Chinese and United States children. Relative to gender differences, the Asian samples differed; that is, Taiwanese girls scored higher on cognitive mathematical anxiety than their male counterparts. On the other hand, boys and girls in the Chinese sample did not differ for either affective or cognitive components. A different outcome was found for the United States sample with girls scoring higher on both affective and cognitive mathematics anxiety relative to the boys. Considering test anxiety, the societal belief is that test anxiety is a phenomenon most often experienced by females. However, this has not been consistently supported by the research. Actually, many studies suggest that males and females experience no significant differences in general test anxiety (D’Ailly & Bergering, 1992; Everson & Millsap, 1991; Rhone, 1986; Sowa & LaFleur, 1986; Zoller & Ben-Chaim, 2990). Regarding social anxiety, it has been found that girls report higher levels of social anxiety than boys (Crick & Ladd, 1993; LaGreca & Stone, 1993). However, no statistically significant differences between genders were found in a sample of children, ages 6-11 (Ginsberg, la Greca, Silverman, 1998). Thus, research suggests, but has not consistently supported gender differences regarding mathematics anxiety, test anxiety or social anxiety. It is, therefore, important that researchers continue to investigate gender differences using different samples. This paper uses different questionnaires to those that have been used before and a common sample to investigate gender differences in mathematics anxiety, test anxiety and social anxiety. Design 341 children, aged 9-11 years from a rural Northeastern Indiana intermediate (Grades 4 & 5) school district completed the Mathematics Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC), the Children’s Test Sensitivity Anxiety Scale (CTAS) and the Social and Phobia Anxiety Inventory for Children (SPAI-C). Examiners group-administered the questionnaires in each child’s respective classroom. The questions were read aloud while each student checked each response using paper and pencil. HYPOTHESES Hypothesis I: Females will be significantly more anxious than males Although the findings of previous research were contradictory, we decided that the weight of the research was on the side of females being more anxious than males. Hypothesis II: Each questionnaire will not identify identical students as having anxiety and this will be accurate for both males and females. This is based on earlier work (Montagano, 2010) using factor analysis where each questionnaire factored separately. METHODOLOGY Multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyze the data for Hypothesis I. Sensitivity and specificity were used to evaluate Hypothesis II. This method uses individual data based on a particular cut-score to make a diagnosis and also to examine the accuracy of the diagnosis. Each questionnaire was used as criterion for the other. The cut score to identify the students with anxiety using each criterion questionnaire was one and a half standard deviations. RESULTS Research hypothesis 1 was supported (p< .002). Research hypothesis 2 was supported in terms of sensitivity but not specificity for both males and females. Sensitivity was less that 76% and some indices less than 33%. Specificity was over 90% in all cases. This means that these questionnaires are not identifying large number of students who are not anxious.