We investigated whether 9-year-olds experience math and/or literacy worries and, if they do, whether it is related to problem-solving abilities. Fifty-eight children judged the correctness of math, literacy, and mental rotation problems that differed in difficulty and rated their worry level about the correctness of judgments. Nonverbal IQ, general math, and literacy abilities were also assessed. Results showed children's worry ratings varied as a function of task and problem difficulty. Latent class analyses of math and literacy worry ratings revealed high-, moderate- and low-worry subgroups in both domains. The high-worry math subgroup exhibited poorer math performance than the other math subgroups, demonstrating a link between math worry and math performance. No relationship was found between worry literacy subgroups and literacy performance. Moreover, no relationship was found between teachers’ rating of children's academic and general worry and children’s own worry ratings. The relevance of the findings for understanding math and literacy worry is discussed. 1. Introduction Insofar as preadolescent children experience academic-related anxieties/worries, it is unclear whether these effects are specific to an academic domain (e.g., math) exists in other domains (e.g., literacy), or, if they exist, affect abilities similarly across domains. Although it is assumed that the trepidation associated with math is greater than other academic domains [1, 2], research into anxiety problem-solving abilities associations in areas other than math is limited, even in older students [1]. Moreover, even though academic anxieties may exist in preadolescent children, it is unclear whether children would be able to accurately describe these experiences because of immature metacognitive abilities. The research reported herein investigates 9-year-olds’ academic anxiety/worry-ability relationships in math, reading, and mental rotation (a nonacademic area), where children rate anxiety level immediately after solving a problem (We use the term “worry” rather than anxiety because pilot work suggested that children could readily provide examples of their worry experiences, but had more difficulty providing examples of anxiety experiences. Moreover, the term “worry” has occasionally been used as a way of describing “anxiety” to children (see [2, 42]). Nevertheless, we also use the generic terms “math anxiety” and “literacy anxiety” because they are used in the literature). The aim is to better understand the nature of academic anxiety/worry-ability associations in
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