ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
What predicts adolescents' mathematics anxiety in the Middle East and North Africa? An interpretable machine learning analysis of six Arab education systems in PISA 2022.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Introduction: Mathematics anxiety is among the most consequential affective barriers to mathematics learning, yet large-scale evidence from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains scarce. Existing research on the region rarely moves beyond linear models, and no study has applied interpretable machine learning (ML) to identify which psychological, instructional, and contextual factors jointly predict mathematics anxiety among Arab adolescents. Methods: Drawing on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022, we analysed 47,652 fifteen-year-old students from the six participating Arab education systems: the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Six algorithms (linear regression, elastic net, random forest, AdaBoost, XGBoost, and LightGBM) were tuned with randomized search under 5-fold cross-validation to predict the PISA mathematics anxiety index (ANXMAT) from 50 predictors spanning competence beliefs, engagement, instructional climate, social relationships, achievement, and demographics. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values, computed exactly for the selected gradient-boosting model, quantified the magnitude, direction, and heterogeneity of each predictor's contribution, complemented by gender- and country-stratified decompositions and five robustness analyses. Results: XGBoost achieved the best cross-validated performance (CV Discussion: The findings are consistent with control-value theory (CVT): perceived competence, not socioeconomic status or resources, is the primary correlate of adolescents' mathematics anxiety in MENA. These cross-sectional findings are predictive, not causal; within the fitted model, the gender-asymmetric social stressors and the region-wide consistency of the predictive architecture identify efficacy-building instruction, anxiety-sensitive homework design, and anti-bullying policy as priority candidates for intervention research across Arab education systems.
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