Effect of State Anxiety on Numerical Task Performance of Adolescents

The aim of the study was to study the relationship between state anxiety and mathematical performance among adolescent boys and girls between 13 and 17 years of age. The study was conducted on a total of 66 students, 37 were boys while 29 were girls. In this study, the researcher set three hypotheses for the study which indicated that there was no significant relationship between state anxiety and mathematical performance and no significance difference in the two variables among adolescent boys and girls. Convenient sampling method was used to select samples from the study. The study used S-Anxiety subscale of STAI and 2 sets of maths questions (for high and low complexity tasks) in order to obtain data. t-tests were used to find the differences in state anxiety and mathematical performance among adolescent boys and girls. Pearsons product moment correlation was used to find out the relationship between state anxiety and mathematical performance. The study concluded that there is no significant difference in state anxiety and mathematical performance among adolescent boys and girls, and there is a significant negative relationship between state anxiety and mathematical performance in high and low complexity task.