Countering Math Anxiety

A report published recently by the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge has eminently explored the nature and resolution of what one calls ‘math anxiety’ – prevalent right from the primary years among a vast majority of students. The study is directed towards examining the factors that influence such anxiety – nay, phobia – among primary and secondary school students. It shows that both teachers and parents may inadvertently play a role in a child’s development of that mathematics-related condition, with the girls tending to get more affected than boys do. The report also points to the mathematics crisis in the UK; according to a 2014 report from Numerical Numeracy, four out of five adults have low functional mathematics skills, and fewer than half of UK adults have low functional literacy levels. This is confounding, considering the high scientific achievements in the UK, the country having to boast of some of the best world-class universities doing commendable research in mathematics, both pure and applied.

What has come out of the study is that in the long term, students with greater mathematics anxiety perform worse than their true mathematics ability. This has to do with their emotional factors. And then this leads to a vicious circle: mathematics anxiety engenders poorer performance and poorer performance leads to increasing mathematics anxiety. The fact of the matter is that anxiety affects performance despite the student having possessed the required merit to, say, crack a problem. Interestingly, the report suggests that teachers and parents have to be aware that their own mathematics anxiety may influence their students’ or children’s mathematics anxiety. So what comes out is that both teachers and parents have to tackle their own anxieties and belief systems in mathematics, the most prevalent belief being that mathematics is tougher, or far tougher, than other subjects. The situation in India’s northeastern region calls for serious attention then, given the fact that here mathematics skills are lower in general, the subject being reckoned a horror of sorts by a vast pool of students, thanks partly to the lack of well-trained, really mathematics-oriented teachers and partly to the students’ own belief systems. Let us not forget that sans mathematics, a huge part of the edifice of science and technology simply crumbles. This cannot be allowed to happen.