Science Anxiety: Sources, Impacts, Co-variates, and Mitigation Strategies

Science anxiety may impede student learning and student literacy in science fields across educational levels and school systems. Further, science anxiety appears to relate both to science tasks (that is, science learning) and to science evaluation (that is, science testing). For example, student surveys using the abbreviated science anxiety scale identified two aspects of science anxiety related to learning and testing; these twin aspects were independently and negatively related to science achievement. Better understanding of the underlying student, school, cultural, and other variables related to science anxiety could well lead to improved understandings of practical approaches that could mitigate science anxiety. Notably, such interventions (by students themselves, by teachers, by schools, by parents) may need to be contextually tailored, and may well need to separately address learning and testing aspects of science anxiety. Finally, students may experience other anxieties for example, generalized anxiety, math anxiety, social anxiety or face unusually stressful life contexts; such circumstances may aggravate their levels of science anxiety.

Students across educational levels appear to be experiencing increased levels of generalized anxiety over time; the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic seems to have increased stress levels on students. Discipline-specific anxieties have appropriately gained research attention; mathematics anxiety appears to have been more thoroughly investigated than has science anxiety. We believe that students may experience science anxiety in unique ways (vis-à-vis their experience of mathematics anxiety, for example). In general, such discipline-specific anxieties have been thought to be counterproductive for student learning and student performance on standardized examinations. Given that some of the highest performing nations on internationally offered assessments also have shown high levels of test anxiety, in the context of science assessments, it is conceivable that certain types of anxiety may be promotive of student learning and performance. We would be pleased to generate a portfolio of research publications addressing science anxiety, particularly with respect to diverse student cohorts from a wide range of educational systems and contexts.

We anticipate that submissions to this Research Topic will involve a focus on science anxiety and closely related variables e.g. test anxiety. Research articles could range from descriptive (mining existing datasets for relationships) to experimental (evaluating strategies to mitigate science anxiety—or to focus such anxieties in adaptive ways) to comparative (identifying and understanding differences in levels and/or influences of science anxiety in differing contexts) to analytical approaches (for example, meta-analyses or literature reviews). Given that mathematics anxiety appears to be well-researched (at least relative to science anxiety), we would anticipate some submissions would relate to overlapping and unique sources of mathematics and science anxieties. Further, generalized and situational anxieties among students may make non-adaptive science anxiety more pronounced, we would expect submissions related to those prospective relationships.