Washington, Sep 19  :  Math jitters grip bright students even as first or second graders and haunts them lifelong, says a study.

Sian Beilock, professor in psychology at the University of Chicago and her colleagues, found most surprisingly that math anxiety harmed the highest-achieving students, who typically have the most working memory.

"You can think of working memory as a kind of 'mental scratchpad' that allows us to 'work' with whatever information is temporarily flowing through consciousness," said Beilock, who co-authored the study with Chicago doctoral candidate Gerardo Ramirez and others.

"It's especially important when we have to do a math problem and juggle numbers in our head. Working memory is one of the major building blocks of IQ," he added, the Journal of Cognition and Development reported.

The team showed that a high degree of math anxiety undermined performance of otherwise successful students, placing them almost half a school year behind their less anxious peers, according to a Chicago statement.

Less talented students with lower working memory were not impacted by anxiety, because they developed simpler ways of dealing with mathematics problems, such as counting on their fingers.

Ironically, because these lower-performing students didn't use working memory much to solve math problems, their performance didn't suffer when worried.

Researchers tested 88 first-graders and 66 second-graders from a large urban school system, to measure their academic abilities, their working memory and their fear of mathematics.

They were asked, on a sliding scale, how nervous they felt to go to the front of the room and work on a mathematics problem on the board.

The study found that among the highest-achieving students, about half had medium to high math anxiety.

Math anxiety was also common among low-achieving students, but it did not impact their performance.

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