Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What do people think of when they think of “math?” We pro-pose that individuals may have very different working defini-tions of the category of math, and that those with broader mathconceptions may have less math anxiety. In Study 1, we intro-duce a method for indexing the “breadth” of individuals’ mathconceptions, and show that there is an inverse relation betweenconception breadth and math anxiety. These results suggestthat math anxiety is related both to how expansive individualsperceive math to be, and how skillful they feel at the activitiesthey think it could involve. Study 2 attempts an intervention onstudents’ conceptions of math with a sample of middle schoolstudents. We find the same inverse relationship in students be-tween math conception breadth and math anxiety as found inadults. We discuss ongoing work that further explores quali-tative variation in math conceptions, and the lessons this mayhold for intervening on math anxiety.