Question: What has your research found aboiut anxiety in math among students learning basic maths and how would be the best way to overcome these challenges

Alex Baxendale answered on 25 Nov 2021:

Math anxiety is incredibly common, some people have suggested that 93% of American adults have it, and large organizations like the OECD (which is made up of numerous countries like the UK, America, Korea, and more) have estimated around 1/3rd of students have it. It’s incredibly common and comes from people having negative experiences, such as mean math teachers, or friends/peers bullying when you get a math question wrong, or even your parents.
This leads to a bunch of problems as really young children can have it (e.g. a 4 year old), and it causes them to avoid doing math and engaging with their classes which prevents them from learning and overcoming their anxieties.
A lot of these problems can be prevented by tackling the root cause of the anxiety which is the negative situations; getting people to change their attitudes toward math and performance in it. There’s an expectation that math is a yes/no subject with no exploration or room for error, when in reality math is kind of like a language we use to express certain things. Errors are a really normal, natural part of the learning process so we should really embrace it more rather than judge people for it.
We’re slowly seeing changes in attitudes already, for example “math is a boys subject” was a really common thought many years ago, and with that we saw a lot of girls being highly math anxious, which impacted their performance. Nowadays we’re seeing a lot less of this, and recent research seems to be inconclusive about whether girls have more or less math anxiety.

My research has been looking at ways we can solve the problems math anxiety causes, which leads to the negative performance. This comes from the horrible thoughts you get when you’re anxious (called ruminations) which consume your mental resources, preventing you from doing the math. At the moment we’re testing out whether reading things aloud can help, because it forces your attention to what you’re reading, and the act of hearing the instructions you read seems to do some cool stuff in the brain which leads to better performance. Recent research we’ve done has shown that reading aloud instructions does lead to better performance in high anxious people, but whilst in a timed math test it’s a bit hit or miss.

So in short; math anxiety is super common and is usually caused by social problems. It leads to poor performance in math, and we think that whilst learning math you should be able to concentrate/perform better by reading the information out loud to yourself, but when doing the math in a timed setting it might not always be the best thing for you.

Sorry for the long essay, I hope this helps!