Worrying about how you'll perform on a math test may actually contribute to a lower test score, US researchers said on Saturday. Math anxiety--feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math--can weaken the brain's limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to calculate difficult math problems, said Mark Ashcrafi, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who studies the problem.  "It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person's working memory," said Ashcraft, who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. Ashcraft said while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small part of a person's working memory, harder calculations require much more. Worrying about math takes up a large part of a person's working memory stores as well,  _ disaster for the anxious student who is taking a high-stakes test  . Stress about how one does on tests like college entrance exams can make even good math students choke. "All of a sudden they start looking for the short cuts," said University of Chicago researcher Sian Beilock. Although test preparation classes can help students get over this anxiety, they are limited to students whose families can afford them. Finally, she said, "It may not be wise to rely completely on scores to predict who will succeed." While the causes of math anxiety are unknown, Ashcraft said, "People who manage to get over math anxiety have completely normal math ability." What can we learn from the text?
The causes of math anxiety have already been found. All of the students attend test preparation classes. Math anxiety weakens working memory needed to do math. Few measures can be taken to get rid of math anxiety.