The Mathematics Anxiety-Complexity Effect in Word Problems

Word problems are notoriously difficult for students to solve and require both mathematical and linguistic processes. Moreover, word problem-solving performance might also be negatively affected by mathematics (math) anxiety, particularly when task complexity increases. Therefore, the study investigated whether math anxiety impacts word problem performance, particularly when mathematical difficulty (i.e., arithmetic carry/borrow operations) or linguistic difficulty (i.e., lexical consistency) increases. In an online experiment with N = 129 adults, we observed that higher math anxiety levels were related to lower performance in word problem-solving. Moreover, math anxiety particularly affected performance in linguistically – but not arithmetically – difficult word problems. This suggests that math-anxious individuals particularly struggle during word problem-solving when the text was more difficult to translate into an arithmetic problem. Therefore, the anxiety-complexity effect in word problems holds for math anxiety affecting the resolution of linguistic complexity rather than arithmetic complexity.