Anxiety, motivation, gender and academic performance of French elementary pupils.
Résumé
Anxiety is known to impact students' academic performance from early grades (Grills-Taquechel, Fletcher, Vaughn, Denton, & Taylor, 2013) to many years later (Shakir, 2014). Our purpose is to examine if the relationships between anxiety, motivational variables (self-efficacy, academic interest), and academic performance according to gender previously found in other populations, would be similar to those found in elementary pupils. In accordance to the literature, we found, regarding girls: negative relationship between anxiety and self-efficacy or academic interest, correlations between anxiety and performance in mathematics and in reading comprehension. For boys: anxiety was negatively related to self-efficacy, but there was no relationship with academic interest or performance. Girls demonstrated higher anxiety than boys. Practical implications and perspectives of this work are discussed.