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Anxiety is a psychological and physiological response to treat a self-concept characterized by subjective, consciously perceived feelings of tension (Spielberger & Vagg, 1995, Vitasari, Wahab, Herawan, Sinnadurai, Othman, & Awang, 2011; Vitasari, Wahab, Herawan, & Sinnadurai, 2011). Anxious students have experience of cognitive deficits like misapprehension of information or blocking of memory and recall (Vitasari, Wahab, Herawan, Othman, & Sinnadurai, 2011). Anxiety response to mathematics is a significant concern in terms of the perception that high anxiety will relate to avoidance of mathematic tasks (Erden & Akgul, 2010). Mathematics anxiety is one of the psycho-physiological barriers that students encounter when they are performing a mathematics task (Vitasari, Herawan, Wahab, Othman, & Sinnadurai, 2010; Vitasari, Wahab, Ahmad, Herawan, & Sinnadurai, 2010; Vitasari et al., 2010c, 2011a). Mathematic is also a source of study anxiety among students, anxiety response to mathematic is a significant concern in terms of the perception that high anxiety will relate to avoidance of mathematics tasks (Anderson, 2007). Mathematic anxiety is lack of ability for an intelligent person to cope with quantification, confronted with a mathematic problem. The prior studies reported that low mathematic achievement significantly contributed to high level anxiety, meanwhile prior high mathematics anxiety hardly related to low mathematics achievement. A previous study investigated that mathematic anxiety as one of the effect lowered achievement (Vitasari et al., 2011b, 2011c). The main characteristic discomfort of mathematics include dislike, worry, and fear with specific behavioral manifestation such as tension, frustration, distress, helpless, and mental disorganization (Ma & Qu, 2007). Poor mathematic performance is best explained of mathematic anxiety, it means that students with a strong mathematic background should be less anxious than that a weak mathematic background.
The study anxiety is situation that refers to anxiety condition during study in term of the perception that high level anxiety relate to obtain of low academic performance. The sources can create as well increase students’ anxiety levels while study process, it make students have bad experience, then they will keep the experience for next situations. Such anxiety can interfere with students’ performance on exam (Harris & Coy, 2004; McCraty, 2003). According to Spielberger (as cited in Sansgiry & Kavita, 2006), It is found that exam anxiety is a situation-specific trait that refers to the anxiety states and worry conditions that are experienced during examinations. Too much anxieties can interrupt exam performance and researchers have been investigated that exam anxiety mostly contribute to negative effect on academic performance (Sansgiry & Kavita, 2006). High degree of anxiety can block thoughts, create negative frame in mind, and potential of poor exam performance. Researcher report that student who is not well prepared for exam may have higher levels of task interfering worry during examination than those are well prepared (Pecararo, 2006).