Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adolescents math anxiety is commonly assessed using questionnaires that identified the anxiety experienced solving arith-metic problems. A more nuanced understanding of math anxiety would be gained by investigating anxiety associated withmath problems encountered in school at the time they are encountered. To this end, we investigated the anxiety associ-ated with algebraic problem solving ability relationships in 129 14-year-olds. We varied problem difficulty and the timeallowed to solve problems, and assessed students anxiety concurrently as they solved problems. Latent variable mixturemodelling revealed meaningfully different patterns of algebra ability and anxiety relationships that changed as a functionof problem difficulty and time pressure. A second study, examining 257 13- to 15-year-olds, successfully replicated theStudy 1 findings. The results highlight the value of using latent variable analysis to identify subgroup patterns of abilitiesand caution against making overly general claims about the role of anxiety in math problem solving.