Supplemental Information:

• ABBREVIATED_MATHEMATICS_ANXIETY_RATING_SCALE.pdf (81.1 KB) Download

Assessment Type:

Self-administered questionnaire

Scale:

5-point Likert scale

Publication Date:

Apr 27, 2012

Respondent:

517 college students in lower level psychology class.

Domain(s) Evaluated:

Attitude / Behavior, Competence

Sample items:

Please indicate your level of anxiety in the following situations. Please choose one box on each line.

		Not at all	A little	A fair amount	Much	Very much
1	Studying for a math test	□	□	□	□	□
2	Taking the math section of a college entrance exam	□	□	□	□	□

Reliability:

Internal reliability = 0.96 | test-retest reliability = 0.90

Validity:

High correlation = 0.92

Frequency:

Frequently

Administration time:

20 minutes

Requires a Computer:

No

Requires Internet Access:

No

Primary reference:

Alexander, L., & Martray, C. (1989). The Development of an Abbreviated Version of the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale. Measurement And Evaluation In Counseling And Development, 22(3), 143-50.

Comments:

Original 98-item MARS was developed by Richardson and Suinn:
Richardson, F., & Suinn, R. M. (1972). The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale: Psychometric Data. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 19(6), 138-149.

Other subsequent studies also developed short versions:
Plake, B., & Parker, C. (1982). The development and validation of a revised version of the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale. Education and Psychological Measurement, 42(2), 551- 557.

Suinn, M., Winston, H.(2003). The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale, a brief version: psychometric data. Psychological Reports, 92(1), 167-173.

There is also a MARS-R version:
Hopko, D. R. (2003). Confirmatory factor analysis of the math anxiety rating scale - revised. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 63(2), 336-351.

A recent study used the original Richardson & Suinn scale to measure mathematics teachers' anxiety:
Hadley, K. M & Dorward, J.(2011). The Relationship among Elementary Teachers' Mathematics Anxiety, Mathematics Instructional Practices, and Student Mathematics Achievement. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction (JoCI), 5(2), 27-44.

Other References:
Beasley, T. M., Long, J. D. Natali, M. (2001). A confirmatory Factor analysis of the Mathematics Anxiety Scale for Children. Measurement and Evaluation in Counselling and Development, 34, 14-26

By using confirmatory factor analysis article suggested that MARS measures an internally consistent, unidimensional construct. Construct validity was seen. MARS-R (Math Anxiety rating scale revised) and MARS-SV (Math Anxiety rating scale short version) seem to be used in more research, possible suggestion to switch the current one to either of them.

Soni, A. & Kumari, S. (2015). The Role of Parental Math Anxiety and Math Attitude in their Children's Math Achievement. International Journal od Science and Math Education, 1-17.

For example this researcher used 3 revised forms of MARS and instead of using A-MARS, the MARS-SV was preferred. The rationale for using MARS-SV was given via component analysis with an oblique rotation. It was shown that MARS-SV has high correlation (r = 0.92) with the original MARS, high internal reliability (0.96) and test-retest reliability (r = 0.90) at 1-week intervals.

STEM Criteria

Science

No

Technology

No

Engineering

No

Math

Yes