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Metacognitive monitoring, the awareness of one’s own knowledge, can inform control decisions like help-seeking. We examined whether and why math anxiety was related to metacognitive monitoring during fraction arithmetic. A combined sample of U.S. adults ( N = 685) completed a fraction arithmetic task and judged how many questions they thought they would correctly answer prior to the task and how many questions they thought they correctly answered after the task. They also reported their math anxiety and math self-concept and completed a number-line estimation task. Adults tended to be underconfident in their performance, but their judgments were more accurate after compared to before the task. Additionally, adults with higher math anxiety had less accurate monitoring before and after completing the arithmetic task even when controlling for prior fraction knowledge. These findings suggest that math-anxious adults may struggle to accurately predict and reflect on their performance.
Pearl et al. (Thu,) studied this question.