From anxiety as a psychological and biological phenomenon to mathematics anxiety: A theoretical approach

Abstract

In the educational field, anxiety towards mathematics has been a recurrent theme that has been intensified with the results of the PISA test of 2012 and 2015. Since students who are anxious about mathematics tend to avoid any area related to mathematics, it leads to a decrease in the number of professionals in mathematics. However, this construct comes from a later history, which is the study of anxiety itself as a psychological and biological phenomenon. For this reason, this work carries out a theoretical revision of those seminal contributions that gave rise to the explanation from the theoretical construct of anxiety for later and in a specific way, to derive in the empirical studies of anxiety towards mathematics.