Anxiety, motivation, and competence in mathematics and reading for children with and without learning difficulties

Pollack, C., Wilmot, D., Centanni, T. M., Halverson, K., Frosch, I., D'Mello, A. M., Romeo, R. R., Imhof, A., Capella, J., Wade, K., Al Dahhan, N. Z., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Christodoulou, J. A. (2021). Anxiety, motivation, and competence in mathematics and reading for children with and without learning difficulties. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 704821. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704821 

Summary: We leveraged existing math anxiety and reading motivation scales to create novel parallel measures of reading anxiety and math motivation to measure socio-emotional characteristics across domains. We found within domain relations among anxiety, motivation, and competence for both math and reading. We also found that reading socio-emotional characteristics predict both reading and math competence, which persisted when accounting for math motivation, nonverbal cognitive ability, age, and gender.