Cognitive-affective determinants of performance in mathematics and verbal domains - Gender differences

Reviewed in this article are the few previous studies that addressed the ap plication of structural modeling to specify the systemic organization of th e relations between self-efficacy, anxiety, gender, and performance. Accord ing to an interactionist approach, one can expect rather different systems of relations when people are confronted with different academic areas and w hen gender is taken into account within the same area. For this study, 476 students in the fourth and fifth grades were asked to take examinations in mathematics and verbal domains and to complete several questionnaires relat ive to these specific domains. Quantitative, rather than qualitative, diffe rences were observed between genders (i,e., multisample analyses). In accor dance with an interactionist approach, there were structural differences be tween the models tested in the two domains. Finally, the results demonstrat ed the value of repeated measures of state anxiety to understand the evolut ion of the relationships with the other variables over time. (C) 2001 Elsev ier Science Inc. All rights reserved.