“Up to 30 percent of adults report moderate or severe mathematics anxiety, experiencing fear or dread when encountering mathematics,” report Holly Klee, Michelle Buehl, and Angela Miller (George Mason University) in this article in Theory Into Practice. For many people, math anxiety begins in elementary school and increases as they move through the grades, leading them to avoid courses and careers that involve math. Research points to four variables that are at play with math-anxious students:
- They believe that doing well in math is important.
- They compare their performance to that of other students and external benchmarks.
- They strive to not mess up and avoid failure versus mastering the material.
- They believe they have very little control over how they’ll do.
How does math anxiety make people less capable? Klee, Buehl, and Miller believe it’s because the anxiety reduces working memory. “The cognitive worry experienced by students with mathematics anxiety,” they say, “can occupy a large portion of working memory, leaving less available to process the task at hand… Thus, students with mathematics anxiety are performing two tasks when others are performing one: they are working to solve the problem while also coping with their anxiety.”
Klee, Buehl, and Miller suggest six ways for teachers to decrease students’ math anxiety and thus improve their self-efficacy and performance:
- Conceptual teaching – “The ‘drill and kill’ method of practicing procedures, while easy to implement and effective in producing ‘correct’ answers, does not help students gain deep understanding of mathematics concepts,” say the authors. It’s better to frame goals in terms of understanding versus correctness and good grades, praise students for working hard and explaining their reasoning, and wrap up lessons with a short explanation of the conceptual takeaways.
- Contextualizing mathematics – Studies show that the more personal and real-world connections students see, the less anxious they are, the more agency they feel, and the better they do.
- Partner and group work – “Encouraging students to work together to discuss potential solutions,” say the authors, “provides students the opportunity to voice their own understandings and potentially recognize there are multiple ways to find the correct solution, which can also support autonomy.” Working together in pairs or small groups is also reassuring when students realize that they’re not the only ones having difficulty. In addition, they can get insights as they wrestle together with problems and come up with novel solutions. Group work increases student autonomy – a valuable psychological factor in success – and allows the teacher to circulate and get ideas about what’s causing difficulty and how to boost the conceptual level of the material.
- Formative assessment and feedback – Frequent, low-stakes checks for understanding let the teacher know whether to slow the lesson down or increase the conceptual level, and also give students feedback on their level of understanding – perhaps a sense of mastery. Low-stakes assessments convey the importance of mastery, versus students comparing themselves to peers. Short online quizzes during and after class give students an immediate sense of how they are doing and focus on whether they used successful or unsuccessful strategies. Some teachers ask students to self-report on their level of mastery and confidence and follow up with individual check-ins.
- How summative assessments are framed – Final exams and end-of-semester tests are when student anxiety is highest, and teachers need to address this head on. Having students talk openly about how they’re feeling before a big test is surprisingly helpful, say the authors: students realize they’re not alone and gain a greater sense of self-efficacy and control. It’s important for teachers to verbally emphasize mastery – This is an opportunity to show what you know – versus performance – I’m looking to catch you on what you don’t know and compare you to your classmates. Teachers should point out that the summative assessment has the same material students have been seeing in formative assessments in recent weeks. It’s also good to be open to feedback on the quality of test questions: if all students got a question wrong, that test item needs to be revised – or the teacher needs to change how the concept was taught.
- Student awareness of strategies to address math anxiety – “One of the most powerful things we can do as educators is to help students be aware of the anxiety they are feeling,” say Klee, Buehl, and Miller. Polling students on their anxiety on the first day of class reveals that students are not alone in the way they are feeling, which is tremendously reassuring. “Hearing anxiety is normal seems to function as a form of social persuasion that increases self-efficacy beliefs and decreases anxiety,” they say. “Checking in throughout the semester, especially around exams, continues this acknowledgement from educators and increases students’ sense of autonomy. Making anxiety a purposeful conversation is an important strategy for reducing it.” One study showed that getting students to write about their worries just before an exam improved performance and speeded up processing time, indicating that working memory had been improved by neutralizing some of those anxious thoughts. Mindfulness interventions have also been shown to improve performance for math-anxious students.
Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #929 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.
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