Mathematics anxiety and self-efficacy among students in Hong Kong and Macao (China): socioeconomic disadvantage as a moderator of academic achievement

Purpose

This study examines whether socioeconomic disadvantage alters the associations of mathematics anxiety and mathematics-specific self-efficacy with mathematics achievement among adolescents in Hong Kong (China) and Macao (China). The research problem is not whether anxiety, efficacy, and socioeconomic status are individually related to achievement; those relationships are already well established. The unresolved question is whether socioeconomic disadvantage functions as a boundary condition on the two psychological-achievement slopes when anxiety and self-efficacy are modeled jointly. Data and methods: This quantitative, observational, cross-sectional secondary analysis uses public PISA 2022 student data for Hong Kong (China) and Macao (China). The source data contained 10,291 relevant student records; after complete-case screening, 9,760 students from 209 schools were analyzed. Mathematics achievement was represented by PV1MATH-PV10MATH, mathematics anxiety by ANXMAT, mathematics self-efficacy by MATHEFF, and socioeconomic disadvantage by reverse weighted-standardized ESCS. Models were estimated separately across all 10 plausible values with final student weights, and sampling variance was estimated with the 80 official Fay-BRR replicate weights before plausible-value pooling.