Original title: Reading and writing anxiety in Finnish school children aged 9-15: Associations with gender, grade level, and reading competence
Rosa Salmela, Santeri Holopainen, Tomi Rautaoja, Emilia Nordenswan +2 · September 2026
School tasks like reading and writing can cause stress, but we know little about how this stress changes as kids grow up. Researchers studied this issue in Finnish students. They looked at three specific types of stress: heavy workloads, being graded or evaluated, and reading or writing in front of other people. Students answered questions measuring these distinct fears, along with general stress and math stress. Overall, students felt relatively low anxiety about reading and writing, but this stress grew as they got older. Older students felt the most stress, and younger students felt the least. Girls felt higher anxiety about tests and social situations as they grew older. Boys felt more anxiety about heavy workloads across all school years. Lower reading skill was linked to higher anxiety, but this link differed between boys and girls. Finally, having general anxiety or math anxiety strongly predicted reading and writing anxiety.
Imagine you have to read a book report out loud in class. One student is afraid the book is too long and they will never finish; another is afraid the teacher will give a bad grade; a third is afraid the class will laugh. Each worry feels different, and knowing which one a student has changes how you help. In this paper, researchers did the same for reading and writing anxiety, separating workload worries, evaluation worries, and social worries in a large group of Finnish students.
Reading and writing anxiety can make school feel miserable and hold students back. This study shows it is not one uniform problem: anxiety grows in the teenage years, girls worry more about being judged, and boys feel overloaded. Knowing these patterns helps teachers and parents offer the right kind of support at the right age.
The abstract reports a cross-sectional sample, so it cannot show whether anxiety causes low reading competence or the reverse. It also only covers Finnish-speaking children in grades 3-9, so results may not transfer to other languages or school systems. The study does not follow individuals over time, so age differences could reflect cohort effects rather than development.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Reading and writing anxiety in Finnish school children aged 9-15: Associations with gender, grade level, and reading competence — Rosa Salmela, Santeri Holopainen, Tomi Rautaoja et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/47zrm_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.