Mathematics anxiety is a widespread problem that affects people of all ages. According to some estimates, nearly one in five Americans experience severe math anxiety, and the vast majority report at least some level of discomfort with the subject. New cognitive and neuroscientific research reveals that math anxiety isn't just a response to poor math performance; in fact, four out of five students with math anxiety have average to high math performance. Rather, math anxiety is related to increased activity in areas of the brain that relate to fear of failure before a math task, not during it.
This fear takes up mental space during a math task, making it difficult to think. In turn, this discomfort tends to make people with math anxiety more reluctant to practice mathematics, which in turn erodes confidence and ability. In part for that reason, anxiety has been linked to worse long-term performance in mathematics than in other academic subjects such as reading. But unlike reading, mathematics has all too often been “dreaded” and revered as a frustrating, boring and almost irrelevant subject for all but a few elite students with innate talent.
Their anxiety tends to increase as they age, as they face more challenging content and “exposure” to other people's negative attitudes toward mathematics; to social stereotypes, for example, about the general difficulty of mathematics or about supposed gender differences in mathematics. These negative attitudes about mathematics: who is capable and worthy of learning it have emerged in debates about mathematics education for more than a century. This perspective formed the basis of the progressive approach to mathematics education during the 1950s, although it was not without its detractors. In fact, they promoted the creation of the National Council of Mathematics Teachers, which, together with the United States Mathematics Association, advocated teaching comprehensive mathematical concepts to “all educated people, not just those engaged in highly technical fields such as astrophysics or engineering.” In the decades since then, discussions have arisen among educators, policy makers, and the public about whether most children will ever need and even be able to understand algebra, geometry, or trigonometry.
This leads a straw man to choose between teaching “rigorous higher mathematics” or teaching “applied mathematics”. In many classrooms, the consequences of this debate have arisen in curricula and educational practices that, according to experts, exacerbate mathematical anxiety and strengthen the so-called “fixed academic mentality”, the belief that mathematical skills are innate and cannot be improved with effort. Students who review lists of equations that are not related to each other are less likely to understand how their progress develops over time. In classes where students are praised for quickly finding the right answer using “approved methods” rather than solving problems creatively or collaboratively, students tend to compete and judge their own ability only in comparison to the way others see them.
Regardless of whether a student starts out with good or bad results in mathematics, a fixed mindset leads them to fear that making a mistake or failing an exam could “demonstrate that they have no innate mathematical ability.” Colleen Ganley, who studies how teachers affect their students' attitudes and performance in mathematics, said that educators with greater mathematical anxiety tend to choose to work in the lower grades (with more basic mathematics), and has discovered that although anxious teachers explicitly try to speak positively about mathematics in class they often “follow the script” and discourage broader class discussions out of fear of being done a question that they don't know how to answer. It's hard to break an idea as entrenched in society as: “Mathematicians are different from the rest of us.” We also need to prepare our children for a world that revolves around big data; a world in which economic, political, environmental and health debates demand that we understand more than just basic arithmetic. And it would be tragic if the vast majority of children only learned to associate mathematics with dread and boredom and never with the beauty of the chaos of nature or with the small Eureka moment of understanding why Pi describes a circle. Or the satisfaction of persevering and eventually finding the solution to a mathematical riddle in your own time even if you need two pages of erasures and different approaches.
A lot of kids are anxious about math. Some experts think that children care more about mathematics than other subjects because they are reputed to be difficult. There is also a stereotype that girls are not good at math which they might believe. This negative relationship is consistent with research that indicates greater mastery and higher anxiety on mathematics exams in older students compared to younger students.
In the Support category reporting that someone did something to decrease confidence in mathematics was positively related to math anxiety but this connection disappeared after controlling general anxiety and before exams. Helping children understand that mathematics doesn't define them but it can help them redefine their world could be key to turning math anxiety into joy.
