But for one group of seventh- and eighth-graders at Westwood Math, Science and Leadership Magnet, class work has already begun.

A new brain-imaging study suggests that the way students deal with that first rush of anxiety can be critical to their actual math performance.

Menon and his team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on 46 2nd- and 3rd-grade students with low and high math anxiety as they worked on addition and subtraction problems.