Many high-achieving students experience math anxiety at a young age -- a problem that can follow them throughout their lives, new research at the University of Chicago shows. In a study of first- and second-graders, Sian Beilock, professor in psychology, found that students report worry and fear about doing math as early as first grade. Most surprisingly math anxiety harmed the highest-achieving students, who typically have the most working memory, Beilock and her colleagues found.

"You can think of working memory as a kind of 'mental scratchpad' that allows us to 'work' with whatever information is temporarily flowing through consciousness," Beilock said. "It's especially important when we have to do a math problem and juggle numbers in our head. Working memory is one of the major building blocks of IQ."

Worries about math can disrupt working memory, which students could otherwise use to succeed. Beilock and other scholars have studied this impact of anxiety on working memory on older students, but her current work is the first to explore the impact on students as they begin school.

The findings are published on the website of the Journal of Cognition and Development. The lead author is UChicago PhD candidate Gerardo Ramirez. Joining he and Beilock in the work are UChicago postdoctoral scholar Elizabeth Gunderson and Susan Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology.

The team showed that a high degree of math anxiety undermined performance of otherwise successful students, placing them almost half a school year behind their less anxious peers, in terms of math achievement.

Less talented students with lower working memory were not impacted by anxiety, because they developed simpler ways of dealing with mathematics problems, such as counting on their fingers. Ironically, because these lower-performing students didn't use working memory much to solve math problems, their performance didn't suffer when worried.