maths anxiety essay

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• Published: 25 February 2021

What impact does maths anxiety have on university students?

• Eihab Khasawneh   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9106-9008 1 , 2 ,
• Cameron Gosling 1 &
• Brett Williams 1  

BMC Psychology volume  9 , Article number:  37 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Maths anxiety is defined as a feeling of tension and apprehension that interferes with maths performance ability, the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations. Our aim was to identify the facilitators and barriers of maths anxiety in university students.

A scoping review methodology was used in this study. A search of databases including: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Scopus, PsycInfo, Medline, Education Resources Information Centre, Google Scholar and grey literature. Articles were included if they addressed the maths anxiety concept, identified barriers and facilitators of maths anxiety, had a study population comprised of university students and were in Arabic or English languages.

Results and discussion

After duplicate removal and applying the inclusion criteria, 10 articles were included in this study. Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. The following themes emerged from the included papers: gender, self-awareness, numerical ability, and learning difficulty. The pattern in which gender impacts maths anxiety differs across countries and disciplines. There was a significant positive relationship between students’ maths self-efficacy and maths performance and between maths self-efficacy, drug calculation self-efficacy and drug calculation performance.

Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. Developing anxiety toward maths might be affected by gender; females are more prone to maths anxiety than males. Maths confidence, maths values and self-efficacy are related to self-awareness. Improving these concepts could end up with overcoming maths anxiety and improving performance.

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Introduction

Maths anxiety can be defined as a feeling of tension, apprehension and anxiety that interferes with maths performance ability the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations [ 1 ]. According to Olango [ 2 ] maths anxiety consists of an affective, behavioural and cognitive response to a perceived threat to self-esteem that occurs as a response to situations involving mathematics. Maths anxiety, which is rooted in emotional factors, can be differentiated from dyscalculia, which is characterized by a specific cognitive deficit in mathematics [ 3 ], in two ways. Firstly, maths anxiety can exist in people who have maths capability even though they may dislike maths. Secondly, maths anxiety has an emotional component which is not the case in dyscalculia [ 4 ].

Maths anxiety may occur in all levels of education from primary school to university education. Harari et al. [ 5 ] reported that negative reactions and numerical confidence are the most salient dimensions of maths anxiety in a sample of first-grade students. Similar findings were also observed at tertiary levels across multiple disciplines, including health care professions. For example, Roykenes and Larsen [ 6 ] studied 116 baccalaureate nursing students and found that there was a negative relationship between previous mathematic likes/dislikes and self-assessment of mathematic ability.

Many factors may contribute to or facilitate the maths anxiety. These factors or facilitators may include teachers, parents, peers and society. Negative experiences of maths learning in classroom or home can lead to maths anxiety [ 7 ]. Firstly, the teacher plays important role in making the class more attractive and reducing anxieties. Good maths teachers can create a learning environment in which students have a positive expectation about their learning [ 8 ]. Secondly, parents play an important part in developing or reducing the maths anxiety of their children. Parents' behaviours and relations with children are very important in this aspect [ 7 ]. By discussing the anxieties and the fears that their children might face, the parents are able to pinpoint any learning problem at early stage [ 8 ]. This might prevent the developing of any learning anxieties that the students might face later in life. Moreover, parents’ maths anxiety causes their children to learn less maths over the school year and to have more maths anxiety by the school year's end [ 9 ]. Thirdly, peers play important role in facilitating maths anxiety [ 7 ]. Peers at any stage of learning may have a negative impact on their colleagues, for example when students might feel inferior in front of their colleagues when they make mistakes [ 7 ]. Finally, society can contribute to the development of maths anxiety due to the misconception about mathematics, or maths myths [ 7 ].

Maths anxiety has negative impacts on individuals; many students who suffer from mathematics anxiety have little confidence in their ability to do mathematics and tend to take the minimum number of required mathematics courses, which greatly limits their career [ 10 ]. Fortunately, certain strategies can act as barriers, or prevent maths anxiety occurring. Uusimaki and Kidman [ 11 ] stated that whenever the persons become self-aware of maths anxiety and its consequences, their abilities to overcome it might increase [ 11 ]. On the other hand, activity-based learning and online/distance learning may reduce the fear of looking stupid in front of peers [ 12 ]. Another strategy is the use of untimed/unassessed (low stakes) tests to reduce the maths anxiety as well as to increase confidence [ 13 ]. Relevancy of studying maths can reduce maths anxiety; applying mathematics and statistics to real-life examples rather than pure maths can reduce maths anxiety [ 13 ].

Empirical investigations first began on maths anxiety in the 1950s, and Dreger and Alken [ 14 ] introduced the concept of maths anxiety to describe students’ attitudinal difficulty with maths. The aim of this study was to identify the facilitators and barriers of maths anxiety in university students using a scoping review methodology.

A scoping review methodology was used in conducting this study to allow for a greater breadth of literature to be investigated. Scoping reviews identify and map existing literature on a selected subject. This scoping review utilised the Arksey and O’Malley framework which includes six methodological steps: identifying the research question, identifying relevant studies, selecting studies, charting the data, collating, summarising and reporting the results and consulting experts [ 15 ]. The scoping approach systematically maps and reviews existing literature on a selected topic [ 16 ] including evidence from both peer-reviewed research and the non-peer reviewed literature.

Identify the research question

After several review iterations, the research team agreed on the question that guided this review: What are the barriers and facilitators of maths anxiety in university students? This question was broad so it could cover a wide literature in different disciplines that allowed a better summary of the available literature.

Identify relevant studies

A list of search terms was compiled from the available literature and previous research into maths anxiety and students. Suitable Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and free text keywords were identified (Table 1 ). A search of databases included: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINHAL), Embase, Scopus, PsycInfo, Medline, ERIC, Trove, Google Scholar and Grey literature. The search involved any related studies from July-2018 backward. Studies in Arabic and English languages were filtered from the search yield and the abstracts scanned. The databases search were conducted by one of the researchers (EK). The search yield resulted in 656 records which were exported to EndNote17 referencing for screening.

Duplicates and irrelevant studies were removed by one of the researchers (EK) and potentially relevant abstracts were complied. The selection process was conducted at two levels: a title and abstract review and full-text review. The title and abstract of the retrieved studies were independently screened (EK and BW) for inclusion based on predetermined criteria. In the second stage, the selected studies full text of potentially eligible studies were assessed and inclusion confirmed by two of the authors (EK and BW). After removing the duplicates, (EK and BW) conducted the title and abstract review of 656 articles. After applying the inclusion criteria 20 articles resulted. These 20 articles were reviewed by (EK and BW) for the second time which ended in 10 articles to be involved in the scoping review.

Study selection (Fig.  1 )

Flow chart of study selection

Articles that met the following inclusion criteria were selected.

Research articles (of any design) available in full text.

The article addressed the maths anxiety concept.

The article identified the barriers and the facilitators of maths anxiety.

The article had a study population comprised of university students.

The article was in Arabic or English languages.

Articles that are systematic and scoping reviews, abstracts, editorials and letters for editors were excluded.

Charting the data

This stage allows data extraction from the included studies for more data description. A narrative review method was used to extract the data from each study. Narrative reviews summarise studies from which conclusions can be drawn into more holistic interpretation by the reviewers [ 17 ]. The data included: the author and the year of publication, the country the study was conducted in, the study design or type, the sample size, results and the theme emerges from the study (Table 2 ). Four themes emerged following full-text review of the 10 included papers, these included: gender, self-awareness, numerical ability and learning difficulties.

Collating, summarising and reporting the results

The data extracted from the included studies are reported in Table 2 . The table shows a summary of the selected articles in this scoping review study. It presents data on the different scales used to evaluate the maths anxiety across the different disciplines. Key outcome data from each of the included studies is presented and includes some of the causes or predictors of maths anxiety in university students such as gender and self-efficacy.

Consultation (optional)

Two experts were contacted for consultation to ensure no new or existing literature was missed; however no new articles were added following this consultation.

Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. Literature analysed in this scoping review spanned disciplines as diverse as education, engineering, health and science while covering diverse geographical locations such as United States (US), Austria, United Kingdom (UK), Israel, Portugal and Canada. The included articles utilised an array of varied study designs, including, cross-sectional, randomised control trial, and prospective cohort studies. The main themes that emerged from this review include gender, self-awareness, numerical ability, and learning difficulty each of these will now be synthesised and discussed.

Six articles addressed the gender concept; two American studies, three European and one Israeli study with mixed findings for the role gender plays in maths anxiety. Some of these articles found that gender has a role in maths anxiety [ 18 , 18 , 20 , 21 ], while others found there was no significant difference between males and females [ 20 , 22 ]. For example, a study of female psychology students in the US reported more maths anxiety than males [ 19 ] whereas there was no significant difference between males and females in maths anxiety in psychology students reported in the UK [ 20 ]. Psychology female students in the US [ 19 ] and Austria [ 21 ], and social science and education female students in Israel showed more maths anxiety than male students [ 22 ]. While in another study there was no significant difference in maths anxiety between males and females in the Portuguese engineering students [ 23 ].

The reasons why females frequently report higher maths anxiety than males is not well understood [ 24 ]. One explanation might be the different gender socialisation during childhood may differentially affect the anxiety experienced by males and females in certain situations which is known as the sex-role socialization hypothesis [ 24 ]. The sex-role socialization hypothesis argues that because mathematics has been traditionally viewed as a male domain, females may be socialised to think of themselves as mathematically incompetent and therefore females may avoid mathematics. When females do participate in mathematical activities they may experience more anxiety than males [ 24 ].

The pattern of gender effect on maths anxiety is different among disciplines and countries. In a recent study, Paechter et al. [ 21 ] administered the Revised Maths Anxiety Ratings Scale (R-MARS) to 225 psychology students at the University of Graz, Austria. This study showed that there were three antecedents of maths anxiety. Firstly, female gender who reported a higher level of maths anxiety β  = − 0.660. Secondly, a high proneness to experience anxiety in general report higher levels of maths anxiety β  = 0.385. Finally, poor grades in maths. According to Paechter et al. [ 21 ] maths anxiety is inversely related to maths grades β  = 0.393. Of the above three factors, female gender was the most strongly related to maths anxiety and is supported by the findings of other studies such as Devine et al. [ 23 ]. Developing anxiety toward maths might be effected by gender and highlights a specific area for future empirical work.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness helps people to manage themselves and improve performances while the opposite is true that lacking self-awareness leads to making the same mistakes repeatedly [ 25 ]. Being self-aware enables us to determine our strengths and areas that can be improved [ 25 ]. Four studies addressed the self-awareness concept in relation to maths anxiety, one American study, one UK study, one Israeli study and one Portuguese study. Under the self-awareness theme, a number of other subthemes emerged including self-efficacy, maths confidence, maths value, maths barriers and performance. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] developed a Drug Calculations Self-Efficacy Scale that measured critical skills of medication calculations (dose of liquid oral drugs, solid drugs, injections, percentage solutions and infusion and drip rates). McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that there was a significant positive correlation between students’ maths self-efficacy and maths performance and between maths self-efficacy, drug calculation self-efficacy and drug calculation performance. Low level of maths anxiety was demonstrated by 10% of the students, medium level by 70% and high level by 20% of the students. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] also noted that numerical skills can be improved by remedial approaches as lectures, study groups, workshops and computer assisted instructions [ 27 ]. The authors suggested that the lectures should be more student-directed not only didactic in nature. Study groups increase the cooperation and encourage students to exchange and clarify information leading to improve the self-efficacy.

Maths confidence, maths value and maths barriers are related to maths behaviour and performance. Hendy et al. [ 28 ] studied maths behaviours in 368 university maths students. They reported maths behaviours (attending class, doing homework, reading textbooks and asking for help) at week 8 of the 15 week-semester using self-reported questionnaires. The aim of their study was identify the subclasses of maths beliefs and their role in maths behaviours. The most commonly reported maths belief was maths confidence (mean rating = 3.79, SD = 0.90). This study reported that students with low maths confidence or high maths anxiety might benefit from the maths self-evaluation and self-regulation interventions. These interventions utilised suggestions which include: maths skills are learnable not innate, assessing current skills and believing in their development abilities, teaching student the specific strategies to solve maths problems and keeping self-regulatory records to track development in overcoming maths anxiety. These interventions may be used in overcoming maths anxiety. This study outlined the approach to develop interventional teaching methods that can be applied to students or course curriculum to help in reducing maths anxiety. Self-awareness might determine the person’s areas of strength that might help future career selection. Self-efficacy, maths confidence and values, maths barriers and performance are factors that related to self-awareness. Assessing these factors can determine the methods of improving self-awareness which may end in overcoming maths anxiety.

Numerical ability

Two articles addressed the numerical ability concept [ 25 , 2 ]. In their efforts to understand the origin of maths anxiety, Maloney et al. [ 29 ] investigated the processing of symbolic magnitude by high and low maths anxious individuals. They reported that high maths anxious individuals have less precise representations of numerical magnitude than their low maths anxious peers. Two experiments were performed on 48 undergraduate students in the University of Waterloo. A single Arabic digit in 18-font Arial font was presented at fixation. Numbers ranged from 1–4 to from 6–9. The participants were told to identify whether the number above five or below it. This study revealed that high maths anxious individuals have a less precise representation of numerical magnitude than the low maths anxious individuals. The results suggest that maths anxiety is associated with low level numerical deficits that compromise the development of higher level mathematical skills.

On the other hand, McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that numerical ability and maths anxiety are the main personal factors that might influence drug calculation ability in nursing students. The numerical ability test (NAT), used by McMullan et al. [ 26 ], is comprised of 15 questions that covered calculation operations like multiplication, addition, fraction, subtraction, percentage, decimals and conversion. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that both numerical ability and drug calculation abilities of the participants (229 UK nursing students) were poor which might have been to an over-reliance on using calculators or not having adequate maths education in the past. Improving numerical ability and reducing maths anxiety can be achieved through teaching in a supportive environment using multiple teaching strategies that address the needs of all students and not being didactic [ 26 ]. Examples of these strategies include: accept and encourage students creative thinking, tolerate dissent, encourage students to trust their judgments, emphasise that everyone is capable of creativity, and serve as a stimulus for creative thinking through brainstorming and modelling [ 30 ].

Learning difficulty

Australian surveys have indicated that 10 to 16 per cent of students are perceived by their teachers to have learning difficulties according to Learning Difficulty Australia (LDA) (2012). Within the population of students with learning difficulties, there is a smaller subset of students who show persistent and long-lasting learning impairments and these are identified as students with a learning disability. It is estimated that approximately 4 per cent of Australian students have a learning disability (LDA 2012).

In this scoping review, one UK study addressed this concept, comparing undergraduate psychology students who represent 71% of the sample and nursing students who represent 14% of the sample who either had dyslexia ( n  = 28) or were assigned to the control group ( n  = 71). In 2014 Jordan et al. [ 31 ] reported that students with dyslexia had higher levels of maths anxiety relative to those without [ 31 ]. This study showed that significant correlations with maths anxiety were found for self-esteem ( r  = − 0.327; n  = 99, p .001), worrying ( r  = 393; n  = 99; p  < 0.001 the denial ( r  = 0.238; n  = 99; p  = 0.018, seeking instrumental support ( r  = 0.206; n  = 99; p  = 0.040 and positive reinterpretation ( r  = − 0.216; n  = 99; p  = 0.032). In addition, this study found that seeking instrumental support served as an indicator of students at high risk of maths anxiety. In explaining variation in maths anxiety. Jordan et al. [ 31 ] claimed that 36% of this variation is due to dyslexia, worrying, denial, seeking instrumental support and positive reinterpretation. The limitation of this study is that not all dyslexia cases were disclosed by the students. As long as some of the students with dyslexia are not reported, the generalisation of this study would be limited. This study recommends positive reframing and thought challenging as techniques to overcome difficult emotions and anxiety.

Limitations and future research

While multiple databases were used in this scoping review, some articles may be missed due to using specific terms in the search strategy. The disciplines covered in this scoping review were psychology, engineering, mathematics and some of the health disciplines such as nursing. Future research might focus on numerical ability and maths anxiety in university students who need maths and calculation in their future careers as engineers and health care professionals.

For example, the relationship between medication and drug calculation errors and maths anxiety in the health care field can be researched. Moreover, the relationship between self-awareness and numerical ability and maths anxiety and their impact on the performance and ability of the university students can be a future research topic. Finally, developing a new teaching package or strategy that reduces maths anxiety can be tested on university students.

Maths anxiety,which is an issue that affects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors, is affected by gender, self-awareness, learning difficulties and numerical ability. Maths anxiety and its contributing factors at tertiary education should be researched more in the future addressing interventions and strategies to overcome maths anxiety. Maths anxiety level measuring tools should be used in determining its level among university students.

Availability of data and materials

It is a scoping review and all the articles that are analysed in this review are listed in the references section.

Abbreviations

Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature

Education Resources Information Centre

High Maths Anxious

Learning Difficulty Australia

Low Maths Anxious

Maths Barrier Scale

Maths Confidence Scale

Medical Subject Headings

Maths Value Scale

United Kingdom

United States

Revised Maths Anxiety Rating Scale

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Article Contents

How does it manifest, what causes it, why break this cycle, what impact does maths anxiety have on our ability to learn, taking anxiety out of the equation, disclosure statement.

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Maths Anxiety – And How to Overcome it

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Florence Gabriel, Maths Anxiety – And How to Overcome it, Significance , Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 34–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01612

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Negative feelings about maths create a barrier to learning. In a world awash with numbers this has worrying implications. Florence Gabriel shares the latest thinking on dealing with “maths anxiety”

Dejected, sad, frustrated, confused, helpless, worried, overwhelmed. These are some of the words school students used when we asked them how they felt about mathematics. In a world where digital data is rampant, and analysing it is key to success, comments such as these have worrying implications for society.

Our research explores student attitudes towards mathematics, and has shown that negative feelings appear early, becoming strongly apparent from school years 4 and 5 (ages 9–10). Globally, by mid to late secondary school, about a third of students report feeling tense, stressed or helpless when dealing with mathematics ( bit.ly/3DyaYna ). These negative emotions can grow into a phobia, a condition we call mathematics anxiety.

The concept of maths anxiety was first reported and researched in the 1950s, where it was originally labelled “mathemaphobia” and “number anxiety”. This early research was the first to show that mathematics anxiety is not an indicator of low maths ability or general intelligence and is separate from general anxiety and test anxiety. Instead, it is concerned with feelings of tension, nervousness, or even fear, that some people experience when doing mathematics at school, at work or at home.

Over time, three main theories have emerged on the relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics achievement. The first is the deficit theory , which claims that maths anxiety stems from poor performance in maths. The second is the debilitating theory , which explains that maths anxiety reduces performance by causing avoidance of maths-related situations. The third and most recent is the reciprocal theory , which states that high anxiety contributes to poor performance, which in turn contributes to higher anxiety, creating a negative feedback loop. 1 This theory is the most commonly accepted in the field today.

Despite being a subject of research for the best part of a century, mathematics anxiety remains a common problem in classrooms and creates real distress for many students. Better understanding of how this anxiety develops and how it can be mitigated has important learning and mental health implications.

Mathematics anxiety can cause physiological symptoms, such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, irregular breathing, stomach ache, and headaches. Interestingly, neuroimaging studies have shown that students with high levels of maths anxiety show more activation in brain regions associated with the detection and experience of pain. 2 It can also trigger emotional symptoms. For example, if you are a teacher and you notice a student panicking or getting angry or irritable during a mathematics lesson, it is possible maths anxiety is the cause. Finally, maths anxiety can have cognitive symptoms, such as intrusive negative thoughts, ruminations or worries, where students end up thinking things like “I am not a maths person, I can't do maths”. These worries create cognitive interference and overload the working memory (i.e., the type of memory that allows us to hold and manipulate information in our head when completing tasks such as mental calculations). And when working memory falls, maths performance often follows.

Maths anxiety is thought to be caused by pre-existing cognitive difficulties, social factors, or a combination of the two. 3 When we examine cognitive factors, research has shown that poor abstract thinking, visuospatial processing (i.e., the ability to mentally represent, analyse, and manipulate objects) and even developmental dyscalculia (i.e., a learning disability that specifically affects mathematics) can contribute to the development of maths anxiety. If we look at social factors, parents' own maths anxiety has a negative impact on children's maths achievement, but only if they frequently help their children with their maths homework (see “Mathemaphobic culture and parental influence”). 4 Additionally, if exposed to teachers who suffer from maths anxiety, students are more likely to develop maths anxiety themselves. Students who experience mathematical difficulties are likely to be more vulnerable to negative social cues and stereotypes from their adult role models, which may create a vicious cycle.

When students experience maths anxiety, they tend to rush through maths questions, lose focus, or simply give up when it all seems too hard. They are usually less confident and are less likely to think of and try multiple different strategies when solving maths problems.

A maths-anxious student need not be bad at maths. Indeed, there are students who could become mathematicians, engineers, programmers, scientists, or economists, but are deterred by their anxiety and subsequent avoidance of subjects, courses and careers that involve mathematics. By avoiding maths and maths-related professions, the future career and earning opportunities of such students can become limited.

Emotions and motivation are now recognised as critical factors for successful learning. They drive initial engagement, perseverance, and ultimately performance on learning tasks by influencing when, how, why, and which learning strategies are used. Students with negative emotions, like maths anxiety, usually display lower levels of motivation, avoid work and do not engage in deep, meaningful learning. In contrast, students with positive emotions towards maths will be more motivated to learn and be more able to control their engagement with learning tasks, ultimately enhancing their commitment to achieving their learning goals.

We recently published a study with the Australian Council for Educational Research where we investigated the ways in which maths anxiety impacts mathematical achievement in high-school students. 5 We analysed data from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment and looked at the responses of more than 4,000 Australian 15-year-old students. Our study showed that higher levels of maths anxiety are associated with lower levels of instrumental motivation (the degree to which students find mathematics relevant), self-concept (students' beliefs in their own abilities in mathematics), perseverance (students' willingness to keep working on difficult problems), and self-efficacy (students' beliefs about their ability to solve specific maths problems). More importantly, we showed a domino effect of these variables upon one another. Using structural equation modelling, we showed that low instrumental motivation and self-concept lead to higher levels of maths anxiety, which impacts perseverance, which in turn affects self-efficacy. This interconnected loop has a negative impact on mathematical achievement.

To reduce the symptoms of mathematics anxiety, or even to prevent it outright, our research supports the need to build and grow student confidence in mathematics. One way to achieve this might be to improve students' self-regulated learning skills to allow them to take ownership of their learning. The definition of self-regulated learning that we use in our lab is that it is an active cyclical process where students plan, monitor, review, and regulate their metacognition (thinking about thinking), motivation and emotions. When students face a difficult learning situation that causes negative emotions, their initial motivation may not be sufficient for them to follow through and to successfully complete the learning task. In this case, students must be able to regulate their emotions to make sure that they keep working on a solution and develop the strategies needed to succeed.

Strong emotion regulation skills can be used to moderate the symptoms of maths anxiety and reduce their negative impact on mathematics learning and achievement. 6 One way of improving students' emotion regulation in maths lessons is to ask students to write out their negative emotions and worries. 7 This writing intervention works well because it helps students reflect on their emotions and so regulate their emotions. Through this intervention, students question the need to worry in the first place, freeing up working memory resources that would otherwise be taken up by ruminations and worries.

Other successful interventions have focused on reappraisal, an important strategy that can help students reframe the symptoms of their maths anxiety as excitement (i.e., acknowledging that increased heart rate and breathing are common to both anxiety and excitement). Strategies such as these show that it is not strictly necessary to completely suppress the negative emotions as long as students are able to manage and regulate them in a more positive way.

From the work done so far in this field, it is becoming clear that developing strong self-regulated learning skills in students can help alleviate maths anxiety, but there is still much we do not yet know. How do self-regulated learning and mathematics anxiety influence each other over time? Can metacognitive strategies help anxious students better prepare for maths exams? Our research team is focused on answering some of these questions through intervention studies targeting students' metacognition and emotion regulation. With this work, we aim to find ways of overcoming students' maths anxiety, helping them develop positive attitudes towards mathematics and giving them a greater sense of control over their mathematical learning to succeed in this world full of data. ■

Stereotypes such as “maths is hard”, “I'm not a maths person, I am better at languages” or “maths is only for nerds” are still commonly heard. The way adults view mathematics influences students' engagement and their success in mathematics. Adults with maths anxiety, including teachers and parents, can pass on their negative emotions and attitudes towards maths. When students turn to their parents for help with their maths homework, it can backfire if the parents themselves experience maths anxiety. They communicate their fears, negativities and frustrations to their children who can then internalise these negative attitudes and, in the worst case, avoid maths entirely. 4

One way around this is for parents to recognise their own maths anxiety and to try to talk about maths in a positive way and encourage their children to think about mathematics in everyday situations when cooking, travelling, playing games, or shopping. Coming up with real-life applications for maths (by scaling up a recipe, shopping for the best price, or focusing on sports and team statistics, for example) can help promote positive attitudes towards maths, reduce maths anxiety, and increase motivation and engagement with the subject.

Storybooks can also be very useful to engage children with mathematics. Popular books include The Monster Who Did My Math by Danny Schnitzlein (aimed at children aged 4–8) and the Sir Cumference series by Cindy Neuschwander and Wayne Geehan (aimed at children aged 8–11).

The author declares no competing interests.

Carey , E. , Hill , F. , Devine , A. and Szücs , D. ( 2016 ) The chicken or the egg? The direction of the relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance . Frontiers in Psychology , 6 , 1987 .

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Maloney , E. A. and Beilock , S. L. ( 2012 ) Math anxiety: Who has it, why it develops, and how to guard against it . Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 16 ( 8 ), 404 – 406 .

Maloney , E. A. , Ramirez , G. , Gunderson , E. A. , Levine , S. C. and Beilock , S. L. ( 2015 ) Intergenerational effects of parents' math anxiety on children's math achievement and anxiety . Psychological Science , 26 ( 9 ), 1480 – 1488 .

Gabriel , F. , Buckley , S. and Barthakur , A. ( 2020 ) The impact of mathematics anxiety on self-regulated learning and mathematical literacy , Australian Journal of Education , 64 ( 3 ), 227 – 242 .

Buckley , S. and Sullivan , P. ( 2021 ) Reframing anxiety and uncertainty in the mathematics classroom. Mathematics Education Research Journal . doi.org/10.1007/s13394-021-00393-8

Ramirez , G. , Shaw , S. T. and Maloney , E. A. ( 2018 ) Math anxiety: Past research, promising interventions, and a new interpretation framework . Educational Psychologist , 53 ( 3 ), 145 – 164 .

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Math Anxiety, Its Factors and Interventions

Introduction.

One of the problems that may affect the classroom environment and student achievement (for age 3-6 years) negatively is math anxiety. Math anxiety strongly affects mathematic achievement in all levels of learning. The anxiety is defined as a negative cognition, avoidance behavior, and inadequate and pressured feeling that affects a student while solving problems related to mathematics. The majority of the learners in the United States struggle with math anxiety (Andrews & Brown, 2015). Due to math anxiety, these students develop fear and dislike towards mathematics, which hinders them from excelling in the subject. Consequently, math anxiety bears an individual as well as national consequences. People who suffer from anxiety tend to avoid studies related to mathematics thus limiting their career options. This paper discusses the development of the problem, impact on the classroom environment and student achievement, causes, and suggested interventions.

Problem Development

According to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial perspective of personality development, an individual’s lifespan is marked by various crises. Every crisis can make a person progress forward or regress. Erickson’s theory in industry versus inferiority stage suggests that children aged about 6 years either become competent or feel inferior in particular skill areas (Ruff & Boes, 2014). In relation to Erikson’s industry versus inferiority stage, problems in mathematics seem to start at the early levels of a child’s education. The issues escalate if they are not addressed on time. According to Ramirez, Chang, Maloney, Levine, and Beilock (2016), math anxiety is a complex experience that is caused by mental bias and experience with negative attitudes towards mathematics.

The anxiety tends to develop initially at the early stages of human development (3-6 years), or even before formal schooling. In the United States, many children in the first grade report different math anxiety levels, which are associated with low math achievement. The anxiety seems to get worse as a child grows older and reaches its peak when the kid is in ninth or tenth grade. This composition of fear and worry towards math plateaus after that and persists into older adulthood. A student suffering from anxiety feels unconfident in his or her ability to solve mathematical problems. As a result, such students can only take the minimum required mathematic courses.

Impact on Classroom Environment and Student Achievement

The avoidance from pursuing advanced math courses makes students feel inadequate to excel in mathematics. The inferiority feeling bars these learners from advancing in their mathematical potential as their education requires. It is estimated that 25% of fourth-year university students and not less than four out of five students from institutions of higher learning in America have either moderate or high math anxiety levels (Ramirez et al., 2016). As a global learning problem, this type of anxiety in various parts of the world is caused by poor results in mathematics or fear of the subject. The impact of the feeling is not restricted to scholarly cases since it is also believed to have a hand in poor medication estimates by nurses, reduced teaching effectiveness amongst teachers, and ineffective financial forecast. In fact, mathematics anxiety in some individuals is so serious that it is even triggered by simple tasks such as reading mathematical formulas loudly. Therefore, math anxiety can have huge and harmful consequences on the daily lives of people. Fear of math is a common problem in many people, not only preventing them from engaging in the subject successfully but also making them avoid pursuing professions that are related to mathematics. As a result, their future career and opportunities become severely limited.

It is paramount to understand how math anxiety leads to poor performance to create effective interventions for reducing its adverse effect on math achievement and overall performance. Although there is no apparent model explaining the causes of math anxiety, there have been various compelling research findings, which give insights on a developmental trajectory for the relationship between math anxiety and student achievement. Math anxiety is more than just feeling anxious about poor math skills. Instead, learners suffering from math anxiety experience worry, especially about performing poorly on the math-related task (Andrews & Brown, 2015). These worries have an adverse impact on the important reasoning and thinking resources required for the successful completion of the assignment.

The “mental scratchpad” that allows the learners to “work” with all forms of data is stored in consciousness. By having an inadequate capacity, operational memory in these learners has reduced effectiveness in integrating, computing, storing, and manipulating math-related information due to math anxiety (Maloney, Waechter, Risko, & Fugelsang, 2012). While doing mathematics, learners with problems in the subject also attend to their uncertainties at the same time, and consequently, they end up failing in the subject. Math anxiety has a higher impact on learners’ performance in the subject than the influence of their abilities. When functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to evaluate brain activation differences between kids with high math anxiety levels and those with low levels as they perform math questions, its results also support the idea that math anxiety interrupts learner’s working memory resources which are essential for completing a given math task.

Apart from showing more brain activations that are related to negative psychological processing, students having a high magnitude of math anxiety also have minimal levels of brain activation related to working memory and excellent performance in math. It is worth noting that the interruption of processes of operational memory is not the sole connection between mathematics anxiety and bad performance while handling mathematics problems (Maloney et al., 2012). Additionally, anxiety makes students avoid math, mathematics classes, as well as careers that are related to the subject (Andrews & Brown, 2015). The cumulative effect of this avoidance is a poor overall performance. In any case, it becomes hard for learners students to improve their math proficiencies if they do not actively participate in mathematical activities. Math learners with this problem usually go through a catch-22 situation in which their math performance is continuously made worse by anxiety. Consequently, these students avoid mathematics and chances for sharpening their skills.

Various adult learning studies show that people having a high degree of mathematics anxiety may process numbers differently from those who are good at the subject. Students having serious problems in mathematics have trouble even when counting items. Performance in higher levels of math depends on counting as its foundation. Therefore, students who do not do well in counting also have difficulty with more advanced mathematics. In line with this relationship, such learners also have worse mathematics performance as compared to their other colleagues. Similarly to counting, number comparison, a vital numerical skill regarding a student’s capability of comparing different numbers, acts as a foundation for more advanced mathematics. People experiencing a low exact depiction of numbers usually have poor math performance. According to Maloney et al. (2012), individuals experiencing severe math problems have a poor accurate illustration of numbers than those who are less anxious when comparing different numbers, in addition to when assessing two numbers that have been presented together at the same time. These findings suggest that students who have problems in doing mathematical calculations have less precision of numbers as compared with their peers with low math anxiety.

Social Factors

Social factors comprise of persistent race and gender stigmas, as well as insufficient or lack of support by parents in low socioeconomic households. Students who have experienced negative subgroup stigma tend to show anxiety, low self-esteem, and no motivation. Different studies suggest that severe math anxiety and low mathematics achievement in females are because of the continued stereotype that girls cannot excel in the subject (Ruff & Boes, 2014). Therefore, girls who are exposed to this myth become greatly vulnerable to high mathematics anxiety extents regardless of their ability to perform well in related courses. Reviewed studies confirm that girls are prone to higher anxiety levels and lower math achievement as compared to boys (Maloney et al., 2012).

The continuation of stereotypes makes math anxiety and low self-esteem rampant among some minority groups. When stereotyped as poor achievers, ethnic minorities are highly likely to lose interest and motivation in math. For instance, African American learners whose performance in math is poor are more likely to avoid engaging in examinations and activities than white students. Additionally, the beliefs and expectations that parents hold can also have a negative impact on a student’s self-esteem and his or her attitude towards math. The parents of students suffering from math anxiety and hailing from low socioeconomic households also struggle with the negative attitude and fear towards math. Most of the time, the negative attitude and beliefs held by these parents are passed on to their children, leading to continuous low math performance. According to Maloney et al. (2012), parental support is paramount to the student’s self-efficacy in math. Students who come from low socioeconomic households do not have this support because of the physical absence of parents or their lack of a good educational background. The vulnerability of students to math anxiety is increased by the absence of such backing in family and academic environments, social expectations, and negative stereotypes.

Cognitive Factors

A biological cognition framework can increase a student’s vulnerability to math anxiety. Dyscalculia, a condition marked with various learning disabilities is also associated with math anxiety. Students who have difficulties in identifying differences in sizes of numbers usually experience high degrees of math anxiety. The foundation of learning advanced math includes the recognition of numerical magnitude. Therefore, students who lack the ability to identify the differences are highly likely to be frustrated, develop low self-esteem, and have a negative attitude towards mathematics when they are introduced to advanced concepts. Students with either average or high math capabilities may also possess cognitive factors that could make them susceptible to math anxiety (Ruff & Boes, 2014). The cognitive aspect of working memory strongly influences the acquisition of skills. Learners having high working memory levels are vulnerable to strain and anxiety, both of which have a negative impact on their performance and learning of math. Emotional reactions that occur as a result of problems in mathematics can deactivate operational memory that is essential for learning and solving problems. When stressed, students are unable to utilize their brains effectively.

Academic Factors

Academic factors, especially the curriculum used in some schools, heavily influence math anxiety. A curriculum that requires students to do timed tests and memorize concepts increase anxiety, consequently, making math a high-risk task. The majority of students in elementary classes who show math anxiety continue to have unpleasant experiences throughout the education system (Ruff & Boes, 2014). Elementary grade math curriculum which does not offer a conceptual understanding of mathematics but rather concentrates on the attainment of shallow comprehension of fundamental computational skills may make young learners become vulnerable to math anxiety. Students learning through such a curriculum forget what they have learned within a very short time and they continue to feel more frustrated. When used in math classes, a traditional curriculum focusing on fundamental skills, tutor lectures, and seatwork is highly likely to cause more math anxiety than a non-traditional curriculum, which emphasizes group work as well as real-life applications.

Apart from the curriculum, math anxiety is also influenced by relationships efficacy and attitudes held by teachers. Teachers whose personality is marked by math fear and anxiety unintentionally pass the traits to their students (Ruff & Boes, 2014). The majority of people with math anxiety report that their fear and hatred towards mathematics were triggered by an inadequate or unfriendly teacher while in elementary school. When a student is taught for one year by a math-anxious teacher, he or she is highly likely to perform poorly and have a negative attitude towards mathematics. When a teacher has math anxiety, he or she lacks confidence in his or her potential to teach the subject and as a result, becomes frustrated. Out of frustration, the teacher disengages from teaching math creatively and instead relies on textbook answer keys.

Interventions

Although math anxiety is believed to be caused by various factors, the feeling leads to a single remarkable negative impact, poor performance. Depending on the different causes, researchers have come up with suggestions on how to reduce math anxiety among students. One of the ways suggested for reducing math anxiety resulting from social factors include raising awareness of math performance stereotypes regarding gender and races to school staff (Ruff & Boes, 2014). Educating parents and encouraging them to attend workshops addressing the stereotype issues is recommended to boost student support of academic accomplishments both at home and school. To identify math learning disabilities developed by students in their early stages of learning promptly, changes in assessment techniques are suggested. Suggested interventions include group work/assessment, open discussion, and real-life applications to replace the traditional curriculums, which provoke math anxiety. Cooperative groups offer students opportunities to share ideas, justify answers, and verbalize thoughts. Teachers also have an imperative task in the reduction or avoidance of students’ mathematics problems (Nipaz, Belecina, & Garvida, 2016). They are also encouraged to analyze their math anxiety and work towards creating friendly classroom settings that are free from stress. To achieve a favorable learning environment, teachers should also encourage all students to participate actively in learning math regardless of whether they make mistakes or not. Such encouragement boosts student’s self-efficacy and reduces mathematics anxiety, thus improved performance.

Since worries that interfere with thinking and reasoning resources essential for handling math tasks are believed to trigger anxiety, high-math-anxious individuals can instantaneously perform better in mathematics if their fears or negative consequences of the fears are reduced. In relation to this argument, Park, Ramirez, and Beilock (2014) show that expressive techniques lessen the magnitude of interfering thoughts that students experience when anxious. Although it cannot be concluded that an easy writing practice can rectify the damage arising from many years of math avoidance, it can undoubtedly assist individuals having such high anxiety rates to perform in accordance with what their utmost capacities warrant. Expressive writing may be a successful math anxiety reduction strategy since it offers students an opportunity for reappraising a possibly negative scenario; in this case a math test. When people see an anxiety-causing situation as a threat, they usually perform below their potential. Moreover, individuals normally perform poorly when they see a given scenario as a negative challenge. Therefore, expressive writing may assist students struggling with anxiety to reappraise their attitude in mathematical tasks as it will make them see an assignment or test in the subject as a positive challenge instead of a threat.

Math anxiety is a serious learning problem whose timely intervention can improve student’s performance in mathematics. Teachers, learning institutions, parents, and students have roles to play to achieve ultimate success in math. When the suggested strategies are implemented early enough, especially at the elementary grade level, students will have a positive attitude towards mathematic as well as a conducive environment for effective learning the subject. With such an environment, teachers will also be effective in their knowledge and skill delivery.

Andrews, A., & Brown, J. (2015). The effects of math anxiety. Education , 135 (3), 362-370.

Maloney, E. A., Waechter, S., Risko, E. F., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Reducing the sex difference in math anxiety: The role of spatial processing ability. Learning and Individual Differences , 22 (3), 380-384.

Nipaz, J. G. G., Belecina, R. R., & Garvida, M. D. (2016). Language of encouragement: Effects on mathematics anxiety, self-efficacy and mathematics performance of college students in the Philippines. World Journal of Research and Review , 2 (5), 09-14.

Park, D., Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. L. (2014). The role of expressive writing in math anxiety. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied , 20 (2), 103-105.

Ramirez, G., Chang, H., Maloney, E. A., Levine, S. C., & Beilock, S. L. (2016). On the relationship between math anxiety and math achievement in early elementary school: The role of problem solving strategies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 141 , 83-100.

Ruff, S. E., & Boes, S. R. (2014). The sum of all fears: The effects of math anxiety on math achievement in fifth grade students and the implications for school counselors. Georgia School Counselors Association Journal , 21 (1), 1-10.

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The Myth Fueling Math Anxiety

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My 2nd grader finishes his math enrichment, then gleefully creates blank versions for his dad and me to try: a subtraction-based, number-placement logic puzzle, intended to be challenging. My husband withdraws for 10 minutes or so, returns and hands over the completed puzzle.

I stare at my blank triangle.

“Mom, aren’t you done yet?” my son asks. “Are you struggling?”

A dull pressure starts to thud behind my eyes. “I’m thinking,” I say, a little too sharply.

By some estimates, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults report severe math anxiety, and the vast majority report at least some level of discomfort with the subject. In a representative survey of U.S. teachers, 67 percent told the EdWeek Research Center that math anxiety was a challenge for their students, and 1 in 4 said they often feel anxious doing math themselves.

Before my son’s question, I wouldn’t have considered myself anxious. I performed reasonably well in school math. As the senior research and data reporter for a national education news site, I’m often happily up to my eyeballs in data and algorithms, fascinated by how changing the weight of a few variables can dramatically change the focus of a problem or its potential solutions. Yet, knowing I wasn’t answering an elementary math puzzle instantly and effortlessly sparked tension, frustration, and even shame that was obvious to my 8-year-old. And below the surface, those feelings raised an even more insidious question that has helped drive math anxiety in American education for more than a century:

Am I not a math person?

Emerging cognitive and neuroscience research finds that math anxiety is not just a response to poor math performance—in fact, 4 out of 5 students with math anxiety are average-to-high math performers. Rather, math anxiety is linked to higher activity in areas of the brain that relate to fear of failure before a math task, not during it. This fear takes up mental bandwidth during a math task—creating, for example, my feeling suddenly blank and unable to think. In turn, that discomfort tends to make those with math anxiety more reluctant to practice math, which then erodes confidence and skill. In part for that reason, anxiety has been linked to worse long-term performance in math than in other academic subjects like reading.

But unlike reading, seen as a joy and necessity for all children, math too often has been “feared and revered” as a frustrating, boring, mostly irrelevant subject for all but a few elite students with inborn talent.

Children aren’t born fearing math. Their anxiety tends to rise as they age, as they confront more challenging content and “exposure to other people’s negative attitudes to mathematics; to social stereotypes, for example about the general difficulty of mathematics or about supposed gender differences in mathematics,” according to one recent analysis.

1 in 4 U.S. teachers often feel anxious doing math.

Those negative attitudes about math—who is capable and worthy of learning it—have bubbled under the surface of math education debates for more than a century.

In the early 1900s, William Heard Kilpatrick, a protege of John Dewey and one of the originators of U.S. math pedagogy, considered math “harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living.” His peer, David Snedden, a highly regarded Teachers College professor and later education commissioner for Massachusetts, similarly called algebra a “nonfunctional and nearly valueless subject for 90 percent of boys and 99 percent of girls.”

This perspective formed the foundation of the progressive approach to math education through the 1950s, although it wasn’t without detractors. In fact, they sparked the creation of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which with the Mathematical Association of America argued for teaching comprehensive math concepts to “every educated person,” not just those going into highly technical fields like astrophysics or engineering.

Off and on in the decades since, arguments have flared among educators, policymakers, and the public about whether most children will ever need and can even understand algebra, geometry, or trigonometry. It leads to straw man choices between teaching “rigorous higher math”—envisioned as abstract, pure, completely divorced from any connection to students’ lives—or teaching “applied math,” seen as limited to the most low-level, utilitarian concepts, with few attempts to help students see connections among them.

Today, the sense of saving higher math for “math people” still holds some sway in K-12 education. A nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of U.S. teachers bears this out: While half of those surveyed believed math instruction should help students understand “deep concepts and structures” and use them to think about the world, 37 percent said that most students’ math instruction should be limited to basic algorithms, with conceptual math taught to “students who show particular ability or interest in entering a math field.” Another 7 percent of teachers viewed math mainly as a college gatekeeper and prioritized teaching math that would help students pass college placement exams like the SAT.

In many classrooms, the fallout from this debate has surfaced in curriculum and instructional practices that experts say exacerbate math anxiety and strengthen a so-called “fixed” academic mindset—the belief that math skill is innate and cannot be improved through effort. Students who plow through lists of equations unconnected to each other are less likely to understand how their progress builds over time. In classes where students are praised for rapidly churning out the right answer using “approved” methods rather than for solving problems creatively or collaboratively, students tend to compete and judge their own ability only in comparison with how others see them.

Regardless of whether a student starts out performing well or poorly in math, a fixed mindset leads students to fear that making a mistake or failing a test could “prove” they have no innate math ability. Colleen Ganley, who studies how teachers affect their students’ math attitudes and performance, said educators with higher math anxiety tend to choose to work in lower grades (with more basic math), and she has found even though anxious teachers explicitly try to speak positively about math in class, they often “stick to the script” and discourage broader class discussions for fear of being asked a question they don’t know how to answer.

It’s hard to break such a strong, socially ingrained idea as, “math people are different from the rest of us.” It’s also necessary to prepare our children for a world revolving around big data, a world in which economic, political, environmental, and health debates all call for us to understand more than just basic arithmetic. And it would be tragic if the vast majority of children only ever learn to associate math with dread and tedium and never with the beauty of nature’s chaos, or the little eureka moment of understanding why pi describes a circle ... or the satisfaction of persevering and finally finding the solution to a math puzzle in your own time, even if it takes two pages of erasures and different approaches.

My son likes that my husband and I come to totally different right answers.

There aren’t “math people” and “non-math people,” only those who work through the challenging lesson and those who surrender too soon. Helping children understand that math doesn’t define them, but can help them redefine their world, could be key to turning math anxiety into joy.

A version of this article appeared in the January 08, 2020 edition of Education Week as You Are Not Your Math Anxiety

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Frontiers for Young Minds

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Who Is Afraid of Math? What Is Math Anxiety? And What Can You Do about It?

Mathematics is a necessary skill that people use throughout their lives, such as when they travel, use money, or keep track of time. Therefore, mathematics is an important skill to learn at school. Unfortunately, many children and adults feel stressed and anxious when they have to do math. People who experience feelings of stress when faced with math-related situations may be experiencing what is called “math anxiety.” Math anxiety affects many people and is related to poor math ability in school and later during adulthood. Researchers have studied how math anxiety first appears, what is happening in the brain when people experience math anxiety, and how to best help people who are suffering with math anxiety.

Have you ever felt stressed and anxious when your math teacher asks you a question? Or when you are doing your math homework? If so, you might have experienced what is called math anxiety . If you have experienced math anxiety, you are not alone. Many people feel extremely nervous when faced with a situation that requires them to do basic mathematics. Math anxiety is more than just feeling nervous about doing math. Nervousness is a sensible reaction to a situation that is actually scary. In contrast, anxiety might not make sense. This means that a person may feel anxious even though he or she knows that there is really no reason to feel anxious. Also, anxiety can cause physical symptoms, such as a racing heart or sweating. Usually, people who have math anxiety believe that they are bad at math and because of this, they do not like math. These feelings lead them to avoid situations in which they have to do math. Children with math anxiety often have poor math skills [ 1 ]. Adults with math anxiety often have trouble with math in their careers and everyday life [ 2 ]. Adults with math anxiety are less likely to show interest, enter, and succeed in careers relating to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Because math anxiety affects many people and is related to poor math skills, it is important to understand when and how math anxiety first appears, what is happening in the brain when people are feeling anxious about math, and how to best help people with math anxiety.

When and How Does Math Anxiety First Appear?

Until recently, scientists and educators thought that math anxiety first appears when children begin to learn complicated mathematics (such as algebra). This would mean that young children (who do not yet do complicated math) do not experience math anxiety. However, recent research has shown that some children as young as 6 years old say that they feel anxious about math. A team of researchers asked 154 children in grades 1 and 2 questions like, “how do you feel when taking a big test in your math class?” [ 3 ] The children had to indicate how nervous they felt by pointing to a position on a scale, ranging from a very nervous face on the left to a calm face on the right. (See Figure 1 for a picture of the scale.) After answering these questions, the children took a math test that measured their math abilities. These researchers found that almost half of the children who participated in the study said that they were at least somewhat nervous about doing math [ 3 ]. Also, children with higher math anxiety got worse scores on the math test. This research tells us that math anxiety and the relationship between math anxiety and math ability develops when children are very young.

• Children used a scale that looks like this to show how nervous they would feel about math-related situations (for example, if they were asked “how do you feel when taking a big test in your math class?”) by pointing to a position on the scale. (This image is based on the Children’s Math Anxiety Questionnaire found at http://spatiallearning.org/media/silc_pdfs/resources/testsandinstruments/tandi-new/Childrens_Math_Anxiety_Questionnaire.pdf .)

Researchers are also interested in how math anxiety develops. Although research has shown that math anxiety and math abilities are related [ 1 ], no study so far has been able to tell us which comes first. In other words, we do not know if being bad at math causes math anxiety, or if having math anxiety makes people bad at math.

Researchers have two ideas about how math anxiety might develop. One idea is that children who struggle with learning numbers when they are very young are more likely to develop math anxiety when they start going to school. This idea has not yet been tested in children. Another idea is that math anxiety develops in children who experience certain kinds of social situations that influence the child’s thoughts or feelings. This means that the child’s emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by things that other people say or do. One study that gives an example of this showed that teachers with high math anxiety were more likely to have students with poorer math achievement at the end of the school year [ 4 ]. This study suggests that the way the teacher acted somehow affected the math ability of the students. Although researchers have not yet answered the question of what comes first, math ability or math anxiety, there have been many important discoveries that have given us hints about when and how math anxiety appears.

What is Happening in the Brain When a Person is Experiencing Math Anxiety?

To better understand how math anxiety develops and how to help people who suffer with it, we need to understand what is happening in brain while a person with math anxiety is doing math. One idea is that the human brain can only process a certain amount of information at a time. A system in the brain that allows us to process information is called working memory . Working memory is a part of the human memory system that allows us to remember and think about several things at the same time. This skill is very important for doing math. For example, if a teacher reads out a math problem, the student must hold all numbers in his or her mind, consider the steps needed to solve the problem, and write out the answer at the same time. Researchers think that maybe, when people feel anxious, the math anxiety that they feel is using up some of their working memory, so they do not have enough working memory left to solve the math problem. Maybe the working memory that is being used for the anxiety would have been used for solving the math problem if those people did not feel so anxious [ 3 ]. In other words, math anxiety causes students to think and worry about how afraid they feel of math, which occupies the working memory resources that they would otherwise use to do the math problems. This idea that math anxiety uses working memory has been supported by research studies. Importantly, researchers have reported that children who have a high level of working memory do better on math tests than children with a low level of working memory.

Researchers have also examined how hard different parts of the brain are working while children with either high or low math anxiety solve challenging math problems [ 5 ]. These researchers asked a group of 7- to 9-year-old children with and without math anxiety to do some math problems while they were in a device called a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner [ 5 ]. An MRI scanner is a machine that can be used to measure how hard each region of the brain is working during a specific task using a tool called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) . (See Figure 2 for a picture of an MRI scanner.) This measurement is called “ brain activation .” If a brain region is working hard, there will be more brain activation. These researchers found that a part of the brain called the amygdala is more activated (working harder) in children with high math anxiety than in children with low math anxiety. Also, in children with high math anxiety, the areas of the brain that deal with working memory and mathematical processing (called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the intraparietal sulcus) are less activated (working less hard) compared with those brain areas in children who have low math anxiety [ 5 ]. The amygdala is a small almond-shaped structure in the lower middle part of the brain and it is important for experiencing and processing emotions, including fear and anxiety. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a larger part of the brain located at the very front of the brain, and it is involved in many complicated behaviors, such as planning and decision making. The intraparietal sulcus is a brain region near the top of the brain that is important for mathematics and paying attention. (See Figure 3 for a picture of where these brain regions are located.) So, overall, this study suggests that when children solve math problems, those children with high math anxiety activate brain regions involved in anxiety, while those children with low math anxiety activate brain regions that are involved with solving math problems.

• Figure 2 - This is a picture of an MRI scanner.
• An MRI scanner is a large donut-shaped magnet that often has a tunnel in the center. The person being studied is placed on a comfortable table that slides into the tunnel. The person then stays very still while the MRI scanner works with a computer to produce clear black-and-white images of the brain. These images can be taken while people do activities to show which areas of the brain are activated.

• This picture shows the brain regions that are more activated (working harder) and the brain regions that are less activated (working less hard) in individuals with high math anxiety when they do math problems.

How Can We Help People with Math Anxiety?

One of the main goals of understanding what causes math anxiety and how math anxiety affects the brain is to find ways to help people with math anxiety and ultimately to prevent it from happening. Some researchers have created tools to help people with math anxiety. These tools are called interventions . For example, researchers have made interventions based on research showing that writing down thoughts and feelings beforehand can make people feel less nervous when taking tests. Researchers thought that if children wrote down their thoughts and feelings, those feelings would not occupy working memory while the children were completing a math test. So, the researchers did an intervention where they asked children with math anxiety to write about their math-related worries. These researchers found that, when students wrote about their math-related worries, their math test scores improved [ 6 ]. A different group of researchers showed that if college students with math anxiety did some breathing exercises to calm them down before a math test, they felt more calm and their scores on the test improved [ 7 ]. Together, these intervention studies provide scientific evidence for ways that we can help people with math anxiety. This research is very promising because it tells us that people with math anxiety can be helped—they are not stuck with math anxiety for life.

Since we know that people with math anxiety face challenges in their math classes, careers, and everyday lives, many different researchers have worked to learn more about math anxiety. Researchers continue to make progress in this area. Research on math anxiety has shown that it develops early, and that it is related to both social situations and brain processes like working memory. Also, individuals with math anxiety show more brain activation in brain regions involved with negative emotions, and less brain activation in brain regions involved with mathematical thinking. Researchers have also started to test possible interventions that seem to help individuals suffering with math anxiety. However, there is still a lot of work to be done to discover how math anxiety first appears, what causes only some people to have it, and how we can help people who have math anxiety. For now, whether you are experiencing math anxiety or not, talk to your fellow students and your teachers about math anxiety. It is important to have conversations about your emotional reactions to math because this is the first step toward helping to reduce the potentially harmful effects of math anxiety.

Math anxiety : ↑ The feeling of being extremely nervous when faced with doing basic mathematics.

Working memory : ↑ A part of the memory system that is used to remember and hold information in your mind so you can use it when doing activities.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) : ↑ An MRI is a machine that uses a strong magnet to create pictures of your brain.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) : ↑ A tool that measures which brain regions are activated while you complete different activities in an MRI scanner, such as adding and subtracting.

Brain activation : ↑ A measure of how hard a region of the brain is working during a specific task. If a brain region is working hard, there will be more brain activation.

Intervention : ↑ A tool or program that is given to people with the goal of helping them improve or get better at a skill.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

[1] ↑ Wu, S. S., Barth, M., Amin, H., Malcarne, V., and Menon, V. 2012. Math anxiety in second and third graders and its relation to mathematics achievement. Front. Psychol. 3:1–11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00162

[2] ↑ Ma, X. 1999. A meta-analysis of the relationship between anxiety toward mathematics and achievement in mathematics. J. Res. Math. Educ. 30:520–40. doi:10.2307/749772

[3] ↑ Ramirez, G., Gunderson, E. A., Levine, S. C., and Beilock, S. L. 2013. Math anxiety, working memory, and math achievement in early elementary school. J. Cogn. Dev. 14:187–202. doi:10.1080/15248372.2012.664593

[4] ↑ Beilock, S. L., Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., and Levine, S. C. 2010. Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107:1860–3. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910967107

[5] ↑ Young, C. B, Wu, S. S., and Menon, V. 2012. The neurodevelopmental basis of math anxiety. Psychol. Sci. 23:492–501. doi:10.1177/0956797611429134

[6] ↑ Park, D., Ramirez, G., and Beilock, S. L. 2014. The role of expressive writing in math anxiety. J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. 20:103–11. doi:10.1037/xap0000013

[7] ↑ Brunyé, T. T., Mahoney, C. R., Giles, G. E., Rapp, D. N., Taylor, H. A., and Kanarek, R. B. 2013. Learning to relax: evaluating four brief interventions for overcoming the negative emotions accompanying math anxiety. Learn. Individ. Differ. 27:1–7. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2013.06.008

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What impact does maths anxiety have on university students?

Eihab khasawneh.

1 Department of Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice, Monash University, Monash University-Peninsula Campus, McMahons Road, Frankston, VIC Australia

2 Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

Cameron Gosling

Brett williams, associated data.

It is a scoping review and all the articles that are analysed in this review are listed in the references section.

Maths anxiety is defined as a feeling of tension and apprehension that interferes with maths performance ability, the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations. Our aim was to identify the facilitators and barriers of maths anxiety in university students.

A scoping review methodology was used in this study. A search of databases including: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Scopus, PsycInfo, Medline, Education Resources Information Centre, Google Scholar and grey literature. Articles were included if they addressed the maths anxiety concept, identified barriers and facilitators of maths anxiety, had a study population comprised of university students and were in Arabic or English languages.

Results and discussion

After duplicate removal and applying the inclusion criteria, 10 articles were included in this study. Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. The following themes emerged from the included papers: gender, self-awareness, numerical ability, and learning difficulty. The pattern in which gender impacts maths anxiety differs across countries and disciplines. There was a significant positive relationship between students’ maths self-efficacy and maths performance and between maths self-efficacy, drug calculation self-efficacy and drug calculation performance.

Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. Developing anxiety toward maths might be affected by gender; females are more prone to maths anxiety than males. Maths confidence, maths values and self-efficacy are related to self-awareness. Improving these concepts could end up with overcoming maths anxiety and improving performance.

Introduction

Maths anxiety can be defined as a feeling of tension, apprehension and anxiety that interferes with maths performance ability the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations [ 1 ]. According to Olango [ 2 ] maths anxiety consists of an affective, behavioural and cognitive response to a perceived threat to self-esteem that occurs as a response to situations involving mathematics. Maths anxiety, which is rooted in emotional factors, can be differentiated from dyscalculia, which is characterized by a specific cognitive deficit in mathematics [ 3 ], in two ways. Firstly, maths anxiety can exist in people who have maths capability even though they may dislike maths. Secondly, maths anxiety has an emotional component which is not the case in dyscalculia [ 4 ].

Maths anxiety may occur in all levels of education from primary school to university education. Harari et al. [ 5 ] reported that negative reactions and numerical confidence are the most salient dimensions of maths anxiety in a sample of first-grade students. Similar findings were also observed at tertiary levels across multiple disciplines, including health care professions. For example, Roykenes and Larsen [ 6 ] studied 116 baccalaureate nursing students and found that there was a negative relationship between previous mathematic likes/dislikes and self-assessment of mathematic ability.

Many factors may contribute to or facilitate the maths anxiety. These factors or facilitators may include teachers, parents, peers and society. Negative experiences of maths learning in classroom or home can lead to maths anxiety [ 7 ]. Firstly, the teacher plays important role in making the class more attractive and reducing anxieties. Good maths teachers can create a learning environment in which students have a positive expectation about their learning [ 8 ]. Secondly, parents play an important part in developing or reducing the maths anxiety of their children. Parents' behaviours and relations with children are very important in this aspect [ 7 ]. By discussing the anxieties and the fears that their children might face, the parents are able to pinpoint any learning problem at early stage [ 8 ]. This might prevent the developing of any learning anxieties that the students might face later in life. Moreover, parents’ maths anxiety causes their children to learn less maths over the school year and to have more maths anxiety by the school year's end [ 9 ]. Thirdly, peers play important role in facilitating maths anxiety [ 7 ]. Peers at any stage of learning may have a negative impact on their colleagues, for example when students might feel inferior in front of their colleagues when they make mistakes [ 7 ]. Finally, society can contribute to the development of maths anxiety due to the misconception about mathematics, or maths myths [ 7 ].

Maths anxiety has negative impacts on individuals; many students who suffer from mathematics anxiety have little confidence in their ability to do mathematics and tend to take the minimum number of required mathematics courses, which greatly limits their career [ 10 ]. Fortunately, certain strategies can act as barriers, or prevent maths anxiety occurring. Uusimaki and Kidman [ 11 ] stated that whenever the persons become self-aware of maths anxiety and its consequences, their abilities to overcome it might increase [ 11 ]. On the other hand, activity-based learning and online/distance learning may reduce the fear of looking stupid in front of peers [ 12 ]. Another strategy is the use of untimed/unassessed (low stakes) tests to reduce the maths anxiety as well as to increase confidence [ 13 ]. Relevancy of studying maths can reduce maths anxiety; applying mathematics and statistics to real-life examples rather than pure maths can reduce maths anxiety [ 13 ].

Empirical investigations first began on maths anxiety in the 1950s, and Dreger and Alken [ 14 ] introduced the concept of maths anxiety to describe students’ attitudinal difficulty with maths. The aim of this study was to identify the facilitators and barriers of maths anxiety in university students using a scoping review methodology.

A scoping review methodology was used in conducting this study to allow for a greater breadth of literature to be investigated. Scoping reviews identify and map existing literature on a selected subject. This scoping review utilised the Arksey and O’Malley framework which includes six methodological steps: identifying the research question, identifying relevant studies, selecting studies, charting the data, collating, summarising and reporting the results and consulting experts [ 15 ]. The scoping approach systematically maps and reviews existing literature on a selected topic [ 16 ] including evidence from both peer-reviewed research and the non-peer reviewed literature.

Identify the research question

After several review iterations, the research team agreed on the question that guided this review: What are the barriers and facilitators of maths anxiety in university students? This question was broad so it could cover a wide literature in different disciplines that allowed a better summary of the available literature.

Identify relevant studies

A list of search terms was compiled from the available literature and previous research into maths anxiety and students. Suitable Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and free text keywords were identified (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). A search of databases included: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINHAL), Embase, Scopus, PsycInfo, Medline, ERIC, Trove, Google Scholar and Grey literature. The search involved any related studies from July-2018 backward. Studies in Arabic and English languages were filtered from the search yield and the abstracts scanned. The databases search were conducted by one of the researchers (EK). The search yield resulted in 656 records which were exported to EndNote17 referencing for screening.

Search strategy including the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) and the keywords

Duplicates and irrelevant studies were removed by one of the researchers (EK) and potentially relevant abstracts were complied. The selection process was conducted at two levels: a title and abstract review and full-text review. The title and abstract of the retrieved studies were independently screened (EK and BW) for inclusion based on predetermined criteria. In the second stage, the selected studies full text of potentially eligible studies were assessed and inclusion confirmed by two of the authors (EK and BW). After removing the duplicates, (EK and BW) conducted the title and abstract review of 656 articles. After applying the inclusion criteria 20 articles resulted. These 20 articles were reviewed by (EK and BW) for the second time which ended in 10 articles to be involved in the scoping review.

Study selection (Fig.  1 )

Flow chart of study selection

Articles that met the following inclusion criteria were selected.

• Research articles (of any design) available in full text.
• The article addressed the maths anxiety concept.
• The article identified the barriers and the facilitators of maths anxiety.
• The article had a study population comprised of university students.
• The article was in Arabic or English languages.

Articles that are systematic and scoping reviews, abstracts, editorials and letters for editors were excluded.

Charting the data

This stage allows data extraction from the included studies for more data description. A narrative review method was used to extract the data from each study. Narrative reviews summarise studies from which conclusions can be drawn into more holistic interpretation by the reviewers [ 17 ]. The data included: the author and the year of publication, the country the study was conducted in, the study design or type, the sample size, results and the theme emerges from the study (Table ​ (Table2). 2 ). Four themes emerged following full-text review of the 10 included papers, these included: gender, self-awareness, numerical ability and learning difficulties.

Included studies reporting author and year of publication, country of origin, undergraduate discipline, study design and participant numbers, primary outcomes and scoping review theme(s)

Collating, summarising and reporting the results

The data extracted from the included studies are reported in Table ​ Table2. 2 . The table shows a summary of the selected articles in this scoping review study. It presents data on the different scales used to evaluate the maths anxiety across the different disciplines. Key outcome data from each of the included studies is presented and includes some of the causes or predictors of maths anxiety in university students such as gender and self-efficacy.

Consultation (optional)

Two experts were contacted for consultation to ensure no new or existing literature was missed; however no new articles were added following this consultation.

Maths anxiety is an issue that effects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors. Literature analysed in this scoping review spanned disciplines as diverse as education, engineering, health and science while covering diverse geographical locations such as United States (US), Austria, United Kingdom (UK), Israel, Portugal and Canada. The included articles utilised an array of varied study designs, including, cross-sectional, randomised control trial, and prospective cohort studies. The main themes that emerged from this review include gender, self-awareness, numerical ability, and learning difficulty each of these will now be synthesised and discussed.

Six articles addressed the gender concept; two American studies, three European and one Israeli study with mixed findings for the role gender plays in maths anxiety. Some of these articles found that gender has a role in maths anxiety [ 18 , 18 , 20 , 21 ], while others found there was no significant difference between males and females [ 20 , 22 ]. For example, a study of female psychology students in the US reported more maths anxiety than males [ 19 ] whereas there was no significant difference between males and females in maths anxiety in psychology students reported in the UK [ 20 ]. Psychology female students in the US [ 19 ] and Austria [ 21 ], and social science and education female students in Israel showed more maths anxiety than male students [ 22 ]. While in another study there was no significant difference in maths anxiety between males and females in the Portuguese engineering students [ 23 ].

The reasons why females frequently report higher maths anxiety than males is not well understood [ 24 ]. One explanation might be the different gender socialisation during childhood may differentially affect the anxiety experienced by males and females in certain situations which is known as the sex-role socialization hypothesis [ 24 ]. The sex-role socialization hypothesis argues that because mathematics has been traditionally viewed as a male domain, females may be socialised to think of themselves as mathematically incompetent and therefore females may avoid mathematics. When females do participate in mathematical activities they may experience more anxiety than males [ 24 ].

The pattern of gender effect on maths anxiety is different among disciplines and countries. In a recent study, Paechter et al. [ 21 ] administered the Revised Maths Anxiety Ratings Scale (R-MARS) to 225 psychology students at the University of Graz, Austria. This study showed that there were three antecedents of maths anxiety. Firstly, female gender who reported a higher level of maths anxiety β  = − 0.660. Secondly, a high proneness to experience anxiety in general report higher levels of maths anxiety β  = 0.385. Finally, poor grades in maths. According to Paechter et al. [ 21 ] maths anxiety is inversely related to maths grades β  = 0.393. Of the above three factors, female gender was the most strongly related to maths anxiety and is supported by the findings of other studies such as Devine et al. [ 23 ]. Developing anxiety toward maths might be effected by gender and highlights a specific area for future empirical work.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness helps people to manage themselves and improve performances while the opposite is true that lacking self-awareness leads to making the same mistakes repeatedly [ 25 ]. Being self-aware enables us to determine our strengths and areas that can be improved [ 25 ]. Four studies addressed the self-awareness concept in relation to maths anxiety, one American study, one UK study, one Israeli study and one Portuguese study. Under the self-awareness theme, a number of other subthemes emerged including self-efficacy, maths confidence, maths value, maths barriers and performance. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] developed a Drug Calculations Self-Efficacy Scale that measured critical skills of medication calculations (dose of liquid oral drugs, solid drugs, injections, percentage solutions and infusion and drip rates). McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that there was a significant positive correlation between students’ maths self-efficacy and maths performance and between maths self-efficacy, drug calculation self-efficacy and drug calculation performance. Low level of maths anxiety was demonstrated by 10% of the students, medium level by 70% and high level by 20% of the students. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] also noted that numerical skills can be improved by remedial approaches as lectures, study groups, workshops and computer assisted instructions [ 27 ]. The authors suggested that the lectures should be more student-directed not only didactic in nature. Study groups increase the cooperation and encourage students to exchange and clarify information leading to improve the self-efficacy.

Maths confidence, maths value and maths barriers are related to maths behaviour and performance. Hendy et al. [ 28 ] studied maths behaviours in 368 university maths students. They reported maths behaviours (attending class, doing homework, reading textbooks and asking for help) at week 8 of the 15 week-semester using self-reported questionnaires. The aim of their study was identify the subclasses of maths beliefs and their role in maths behaviours. The most commonly reported maths belief was maths confidence (mean rating = 3.79, SD = 0.90). This study reported that students with low maths confidence or high maths anxiety might benefit from the maths self-evaluation and self-regulation interventions. These interventions utilised suggestions which include: maths skills are learnable not innate, assessing current skills and believing in their development abilities, teaching student the specific strategies to solve maths problems and keeping self-regulatory records to track development in overcoming maths anxiety. These interventions may be used in overcoming maths anxiety. This study outlined the approach to develop interventional teaching methods that can be applied to students or course curriculum to help in reducing maths anxiety. Self-awareness might determine the person’s areas of strength that might help future career selection. Self-efficacy, maths confidence and values, maths barriers and performance are factors that related to self-awareness. Assessing these factors can determine the methods of improving self-awareness which may end in overcoming maths anxiety.

Numerical ability

Two articles addressed the numerical ability concept [ 25 , 2 ]. In their efforts to understand the origin of maths anxiety, Maloney et al. [ 29 ] investigated the processing of symbolic magnitude by high and low maths anxious individuals. They reported that high maths anxious individuals have less precise representations of numerical magnitude than their low maths anxious peers. Two experiments were performed on 48 undergraduate students in the University of Waterloo. A single Arabic digit in 18-font Arial font was presented at fixation. Numbers ranged from 1–4 to from 6–9. The participants were told to identify whether the number above five or below it. This study revealed that high maths anxious individuals have a less precise representation of numerical magnitude than the low maths anxious individuals. The results suggest that maths anxiety is associated with low level numerical deficits that compromise the development of higher level mathematical skills.

On the other hand, McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that numerical ability and maths anxiety are the main personal factors that might influence drug calculation ability in nursing students. The numerical ability test (NAT), used by McMullan et al. [ 26 ], is comprised of 15 questions that covered calculation operations like multiplication, addition, fraction, subtraction, percentage, decimals and conversion. McMullan et al. [ 26 ] reported that both numerical ability and drug calculation abilities of the participants (229 UK nursing students) were poor which might have been to an over-reliance on using calculators or not having adequate maths education in the past. Improving numerical ability and reducing maths anxiety can be achieved through teaching in a supportive environment using multiple teaching strategies that address the needs of all students and not being didactic [ 26 ]. Examples of these strategies include: accept and encourage students creative thinking, tolerate dissent, encourage students to trust their judgments, emphasise that everyone is capable of creativity, and serve as a stimulus for creative thinking through brainstorming and modelling [ 30 ].

Learning difficulty

Australian surveys have indicated that 10 to 16 per cent of students are perceived by their teachers to have learning difficulties according to Learning Difficulty Australia (LDA) (2012). Within the population of students with learning difficulties, there is a smaller subset of students who show persistent and long-lasting learning impairments and these are identified as students with a learning disability. It is estimated that approximately 4 per cent of Australian students have a learning disability (LDA 2012).

In this scoping review, one UK study addressed this concept, comparing undergraduate psychology students who represent 71% of the sample and nursing students who represent 14% of the sample who either had dyslexia ( n  = 28) or were assigned to the control group ( n  = 71). In 2014 Jordan et al. [ 31 ] reported that students with dyslexia had higher levels of maths anxiety relative to those without [ 31 ]. This study showed that significant correlations with maths anxiety were found for self-esteem ( r  = − 0.327; n  = 99, p .001), worrying ( r  = 393; n  = 99; p  < 0.001 the denial ( r  = 0.238; n  = 99; p  = 0.018, seeking instrumental support ( r  = 0.206; n  = 99; p  = 0.040 and positive reinterpretation ( r  = − 0.216; n  = 99; p  = 0.032). In addition, this study found that seeking instrumental support served as an indicator of students at high risk of maths anxiety. In explaining variation in maths anxiety. Jordan et al. [ 31 ] claimed that 36% of this variation is due to dyslexia, worrying, denial, seeking instrumental support and positive reinterpretation. The limitation of this study is that not all dyslexia cases were disclosed by the students. As long as some of the students with dyslexia are not reported, the generalisation of this study would be limited. This study recommends positive reframing and thought challenging as techniques to overcome difficult emotions and anxiety.

Limitations and future research

While multiple databases were used in this scoping review, some articles may be missed due to using specific terms in the search strategy. The disciplines covered in this scoping review were psychology, engineering, mathematics and some of the health disciplines such as nursing. Future research might focus on numerical ability and maths anxiety in university students who need maths and calculation in their future careers as engineers and health care professionals.

For example, the relationship between medication and drug calculation errors and maths anxiety in the health care field can be researched. Moreover, the relationship between self-awareness and numerical ability and maths anxiety and their impact on the performance and ability of the university students can be a future research topic. Finally, developing a new teaching package or strategy that reduces maths anxiety can be tested on university students.

Maths anxiety,which is an issue that affects many disciplines across multiple countries and sectors, is affected by gender, self-awareness, learning difficulties and numerical ability. Maths anxiety and its contributing factors at tertiary education should be researched more in the future addressing interventions and strategies to overcome maths anxiety. Maths anxiety level measuring tools should be used in determining its level among university students.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Monash University librarians for their help and support.

Abbreviations

Authors’ contributions.

EK conceived, designed and carried out the study, interpreted the analysis, and drafted and revised the manuscript. BW conceived, designed, drafted and revised the manuscript. CG helped conceive, drafted and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Not applicable.

Availability of data and materials

Ethics approval and consent to participate, competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Report examines origins and nature of ‘maths anxiety’

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A report out today examines the factors that influence ‘maths anxiety’ among primary and secondary school students, showing that teachers and parents may inadvertently play a role in a child’s development of the condition, and that girls tend to be more affected than boys.

While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students Denes Szucs

The report was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, with additional support from the James S McDonnell Foundation.

The UK is facing a maths crisis: according to a 2014 report from National Numeracy, four out of five adults have low functional mathematics skills compared to fewer than half of UK adults having low functional literacy levels.

While mathematics is often considered a hard subject, not all difficulties with the subject result from cognitive difficulties. Many children and adults experience feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a maths problem.

A report published today by the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge explores the nature and resolution of so-called ‘mathematics anxiety’.

Origins of maths anxiety

In a sample of 1,000 Italian students, the researchers found that girls in both primary and secondary school had higher levels of both maths anxiety and general anxiety.

More detailed investigation in 1,700 UK schoolchildren found that a general feeling that maths was more difficult than other subjects often contributed to maths anxiety, leading to a lack or loss of confidence. Students pointed to poor marks or test results, or negative comparisons to peers or siblings as reasons for feeling anxious.

“While every child’s maths anxiety may be different, with unique origins and triggers, we found several common issues among both the primary and secondary school students that we interviewed,” says Dr Denes Szucs from the Department of Psychology, the study’s lead author.

Students often discussed the role that their teachers and parents played in their development of maths anxiety. Primary-aged children referred to instances where they had been confused by different teaching methods, while secondary students commented on poor interpersonal relations.

Secondary students indicated that the transition from primary to secondary school had been a cause of maths anxiety, as the work seemed harder and they couldn’t cope. There was also greater pressure from tests – in particular, SATS – and an increased homework load.

Relationship between maths anxiety and performance

In a study published in 2018, the researchers showed that it is not only children with low maths ability who experience maths anxiety – more than three-quarters (77%) of children with high maths anxiety are normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests.

“Because these children perform well at tests, their maths anxiety is at high risk of going unnoticed by their teachers and parents, who may only look at performance but not at emotional factors,” says Dr Amy Devine, the 2018 study’s first author, who now works for Cambridge Assessment English. “But their anxiety may keep these students away from STEM fields for life when in fact they would be perfectly able to perform well in these fields.”

However, it is almost certainly the case that in the long term, people with greater maths anxiety perform worse than their true maths ability. Today’s report includes a review of existing research literature that shows that this can lead to a vicious circle: maths anxiety leading to poorer performance and poorer performance increasing maths anxiety.

Recommendations

The researchers set out a number of recommendations in the report. These include the need for teachers to be conscious that an individual’s maths anxiety likely affects their mathematics performance. Teachers and parents also need to be aware that their own maths anxiety might influence their students’ or child’s maths anxiety and that gendered stereotypes about mathematics suitability and ability might contribute to the gender gap in maths performance.

“Teachers, parents, brothers and sisters and classmates can all play a role in shaping a child’s maths anxiety,” adds co-author Dr Ros McLellan from the Faculty of Education. “Parents and teachers should also be mindful of how they may unwittingly contribute to a child’s maths anxiety. Tackling their own anxieties and belief systems in maths might be the first step to helping their children or students.”

The researchers say that as maths anxiety is present from a young age but may develop as the child grows, further research should be focused on how maths anxiety can be best remediated before any strong link with performance begins to emerge.

“Our findings should be of real concern for educators. We should be tackling the problem of maths anxiety now to enable these young people to stop feeling anxious about learning mathematics and give them the opportunity to flourish,” says Dr Szucs. “If we can improve a student’s experience within their maths lessons, we can help lessen their maths anxiety, and in turn this may increase their overall maths performance.”

Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “Mathematical achievement is valuable in its own right, as a foundation for many other subjects and as an important predictor of future academic outcomes, employment opportunities and even health. Maths anxiety can severely disrupt students’ performance in the subject in both primary and secondary school. But importantly - and surprisingly - this new research suggests that the majority of students experiencing maths anxiety have normal to high maths ability. We hope that the report’s recommendations will inform the design of school and home-based interventions and approaches to prevent maths anxiety developing in the first place.”

Researchers worked with more than 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy to examine both maths anxiety and general anxiety, and gain a measure of mathematics performance. They then worked one-to-one with the children to gain a deeper understanding of their cognitive abilities and feelings towards mathematics.

This is the first interview-based study of its kind to compare the mathematics learning experiences of a relatively large sample of students identified as mathematics anxious with similar children that are not mathematics anxious. Although further in-depth studies are needed to substantiate and expand upon this work, the findings indicate that the mathematics classroom is a very different world for children that are mathematics anxious compared to those that are not.

Reference Understanding Mathematics Anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. 14 March 2019

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How to beat maths anxiety

Getting stressed about maths is so common, yet there’s no need. with the right approach, you can even start enjoying it.

by Shayla Love   + BIO

is a staff writer at Psyche. Her science journalism has appeared in Vice , The New York Times and Wired , among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Edited by Christian Jarrett

Need to know

In 1975, an anxiety clinic opened at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. This wasn’t your typical clinic: people didn’t go because they were fretful about their health or personal lives, they showed up to confront an overwhelming anxiety of doing maths.

Sheila Tobias, a US educator who wrote the book Overcoming Math Anxiety (1978), opened the clinic and interviewed hundreds of college students. Many were women who were told that ‘girls don’t do math’, while others had concluded ‘that they would either be good with numbers or with words but that they could not be good with both,’ she wrote in a 1990 article . It’s true that maths doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s not a subject widely known for being a good time or easy to do. ‘Maths seemed dreary, never any fun,’ Tobias wrote. For some people, however, this kind of negative perception translates into more than just a distaste.

Do this maths problem: 34 minus 19. Do it in your head without paper, and then imagine another person watching you. How does that make you feel? Mark Ashcraft, a US psychologist who studied maths anxiety, described how people in his studies responded to solving similar problems. Many showed ‘unease or apprehension’. They had ‘trembling hands, nervous laughter, and so forth,’ he wrote . ‘Many ask, defensively, if their performance says anything about their overall intelligence.’

If you had a comparable response – uncomfortable physical sensations and worry about getting the right answer – you might have some degree of maths anxiety. It can range from mild to extreme: it’s defined as feeling any tension, apprehension or fear that interferes with doing maths or maths performance.

Maths anxiety is extremely common and it can hold you back

You may not have realised that maths anxiety had a name at all, but if you’ve tended to go out of your way to avoid maths, it’s likely affected your life. Consider your past choices in school: you might have opted to take fewer maths classes, limiting your later educational and career options. If you have low self-esteem about yourself in regards to maths, you might have avoided jobs or hobbies that involve maths. Parents with maths anxiety can pass on the feeling to their kids: those children have been found to learn less maths over the course of a school year, and are more likely to develop maths anxiety themselves.

It’s not shameful to bristle at the thought of doing maths problems, and you’re certainly not alone if you’re discovering you’ve set up your life to do as little maths as possible. The concept of maths anxiety dates back to 1957 when psychologists first tested college students for ‘number anxiety’. Around the same time, a nun who taught maths at Catholic schools, Sister Mary Fides Gough, noticed that some of her students had what she called mathemaphobia .

Today, about 93 per cent of US adults say they have some amount of maths anxiety, and 17 per cent report high levels. Across 34 countries, surveys taken in 2012 have found that 59 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds say they worry maths classes will be difficult for them. About a third feel tense while doing maths homework, and 31 per cent are ‘very nervous’ doing maths problems.

Maths anxiety is considered distinct from dyscalculia , a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand fundamental numerical concepts, such as counting or recognising numbers, and which is beyond the scope of this Guide. Dyscalculia is usually picked up by teachers and, similar to dyslexia, is focused more on ability than negative emotions. It can lead to maths anxiety, but should be addressed separately through learning programmes.

Struggling with maths and having anxiety around it aren’t always linked. Some people who perform poorly in maths don’t get anxious about it, whereas others who are good at maths worry about it a lot. A study in the UK in 2018 found that more than three-quarters of children who had maths anxiety had normal to high scores on their maths tests.

Even if your objective is not to switch careers and become a mathematician, maths anxiety can be a burden, causing you stress whenever you encounter maths in daily life, whether that’s at work, out shopping, sorting your personal finances or supporting your children with their homework. The good news is there are some proven ways to start changing your relationship to maths, even if your day-to-day life doesn’t currently require you to do much of it. These steps won’t easily propel you into a higher-level maths class, or turn you into a mathematical genius. But they can boost your confidence and make the prospect of doing maths in any situation more feasible, less stressful – and perhaps even fun. Some of these methods do involve sitting down and doing some maths, but many do not. This is because maths anxiety doesn’t emerge from maths alone: it stems from our ideas about maths, what we are told by parents and teachers, and cultural stereotypes about what maths is and who it’s for.

Understand that there is no such thing as a ‘maths person’

If you stop to think about it, it’s somewhat odd that so many people are more intimidated by numbers than by other kinds of information, says Alex Moore, an associate professor of psychology at Illinois College. ‘Why that is, we’re not entirely sure,’ he says. Learning a foreign language or reading Beowulf can be just as cognitively demanding or complex as manipulating numbers, yet people tend not to be as intimidated by these sorts of linguistic activities.

‘Maths anxiety seems to be a commoner problem than fear of other academic subjects,’ says Ann Dowker, a developmental psychologist at the University of Oxford in the UK who studies the development of mathematical cognition.

There are a number of myths surrounding maths that could contribute to people feeling anxious about it, more than other subjects. They might assume maths is monotonous, too abstract, or consider it a subject devoid of feeling. But one myth prevails above them all, says Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in California, and that’s the notion that only some people can be good at maths. This creates a unique performance anxiety that can make doing maths fraught.

This myth is fed by the trope of the maths genius, like in the scene from the film A Beautiful Mind (2001), in which a mathematician sees equations appear before him like magic. Even if you don’t expect to have that experience with maths, you might still identify as not a ‘maths person’. Because so many people often express fears about maths, it reinforces the narrative that maths is difficult, or that only certain people are good at it, and that there’s something to fear when starting to work with numbers. If you had anxiety around maths at school, you might have come to see yourself as ‘not a numbers person’, and then concluded that you will never like it. If that’s the case, it’s understandable that you started to feel anxious whenever it was time to do some maths.

The first step to overcoming maths anxiety, then, is to remind yourself that maths isn’t just for certain people. Anyone can do at least some maths. Once you set aside pressure to become really good at it, and stop worrying about how much innate aptitude you may or may not have, this should help your anxiety fade away naturally.

Be aware of and challenge harmful maths stereotypes

The myth of a ‘maths person’ has problematic origins. Long enmeshed in the myth is the notion that it’s not just that some people are better at maths, but that those people fall into certain groups. Most common is the cultural belief that men thrive more in maths (along with other STEM fields) than women. Consider how in 1992 Mattel released ‘Teen Talk Barbie’ who spoke a number of phrases, including ‘Want to have a pizza party?’ and ‘Let’s go shopping!’ but also ‘Math class is tough!’ This led to criticisms that Mattel was perpetuating the widespread idea that maths was especially difficult for women.

If you have maths anxiety, especially if you’re a woman, it could be helpful to recognise how pervasive these stereotypes have been. Moore wrote a book chapter with Mark Ashcraft, published in 2013, in which they provided other examples of harmful stereotypes being perpetuated. For instance, the clothing store Forever 21 made pink magnets that read ‘I’m too pretty to do math!’ and JCPenney sold sweatshirts that read ‘I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me.’ These stereotypes can fuel maths anxiety and doubtless feed into the fact that maths anxiety tends to be higher in women. In experiments, when women feel the pressure to prove such stereotypes wrong, it can lead them to perform poorly on maths tests.

These kinds of gender stereotypes haven’t gone away. Boaler says it’s still widely believed that ‘people with a maths brain are male’. There are unhelpful racial stereotypes related to maths too, she adds, such as that ‘certain racial groups: white or Asian’ are better at maths.

To counter the harmful influence of stereotypes surrounding maths ability, it’s worth spending some time questioning your assumptions of which groups are supposedly ‘good’ at maths and which aren’t. It might help to expose yourself to examples that challenge these stereotypes, such as by reading about female mathematicians.

One reason why Tobias’s work on maths anxiety made such an impact is that she considered it a feminist issue to help women overcome their maths anxiety. ‘She described for the first time that there is no more a math mind than there is a history mind,’ the US writer and feminist Gloria Steinem said in a 2007 interview about Tobias. ‘It is just that people learn in different ways.’

In school, you might have done maths under timed conditions: taking tests, and solving problems as quickly as possible. The notion that maths has to be done at rapid speeds is a toxic one, Boaler says. ‘Anybody who’s in a learning situation where they’re put on the spot and have this kind of procedural teaching is going to have anxiety,’ she says.

The US mathematician Steven Strogatz has talked to Boaler about how he is a ‘slow’ mathematician. ‘In terms of being the fastest kid and the most powerful logical brain, I was always near the bottom of my class,’ he said in an interview. ‘I really was. I mean, if I had let that stop me, I would have stopped.’ Instead, he accepted that maths is not about speed. ‘I’m slow,’ he said. ‘So what. Many mathematicians are slow and real math is not about speed.’

There are studies showing that intelligent people solve easier problems quickly, but they take their time finishing more difficult ones. One study from 2017 found that in Finland, unlike most other countries, children’s maths anxiety seems to go down, rather than increase, after the beginning of primary school. That might be because there is relatively little high-stakes testing, Dowker says.

Return to the subtraction problem from earlier: 34 minus 19. Even if you can do this quickly, experiment with solving for the answer in a much slower way, without any pressure. Do it slowly enough to notice your body calming down, and how you still arrive at the answer eventually, no matter how long it takes.

Write down your feelings

When facing a maths problem, whether in school or in life, once you’ve accepted that it’s not important if the answer doesn’t come quickly, you might also spend some time writing down what feelings arise.

This might not work while in a restaurant calculating the tip, but carve out some time at home or in your free time to do simple maths problems while also doing expressive writing. Expressive writing is when you write for a specific period of time about your emotions and thoughts that come up in response to a stressful maths situation, such as sadness that you’re not good or smart enough, stress that you’re going to fail, or anxiety or anger that it’s too hard. Many studies have now shown that writing about maths anxiety can help reduce it. Writing before you do maths may help to unload your anxious thoughts so that they distract you less when actually doing a maths problem, Dowker says.

This kind of writing exercise can be done 5 to 10 minutes before doing maths, if you’re still in school and about to take a maths test. Or, if you’re doing maths homework or practising maths exercises, you could consider doing expressive writing at the same time. To do that, draw a line down the centre of a piece of paper, do maths on one side, and write down the emotions that come up next to it. Write specifically about your anxiety, and why you feel that way, Dowker says. If failure is a concern, write about why failure would be important. Writing about your maths anxiety may help to unload your anxious thoughts so that they distract you less when doing a maths problem during a test or in an everyday situation.

Get out of a ‘right or wrong’ mindset

Unlike humanities subjects, maths is often seen as a subject where you’re either right or wrong, and this can create pressure. ‘It’s taught in such a rigid way that it makes people think: “I’m just supposed to memorise this set of rules”,’ says Gerardo Ramirez, an assistant professor of educational psychology at Ball State University in Indiana.

‘For some people, being wrong can feel threatening,’ Dowker says. If you feel this way about maths, it’s not your fault, but a reflection of how maths is presented in school. ‘We teach maths as a right-and-wrong subject, where your role is to come up with answers,’ Boaler says. ‘Often under time pressure. Often, you get negative feedback that those answers aren’t right.’

The mathematician Claudia Zaslavsky wrote in her book Fear of Math: How to Get Over It and Get on with Your Life (1994) that maths is not only about coming up with the right answer, but also the process used to arrive at that answer. She thought that teaching students about this process could help them confront their fears of being ‘right or wrong’ about maths.

The free online course ‘How to Learn Math’ developed by Boaler contains an exercise to counter this way of thinking. It asks you to do 18 x 5 in your head without writing on paper. ‘It doesn’t matter if you are wrong,’ Boaler says in the video. The answer is 90, but ‘the most interesting part of the problem is not the 90. It is the ways people get to 90, the different pathways they use.’

Boaler interviewed people on the street in San Francisco as well as Stanford students to solve this same multiplication problem. She found that everyone solved it in a slightly different way. Some people first did 10 x 5 to get 50. Then, 8 x 5 is 40. And 50 + 40 equals 90. Others did 5 x 20 to get 100, then subtracting 10 to get 90.

Take a moment now to try coming up with a few different ways to solve a simple maths question: this will help you get out of the right-or-wrong mindset and begin enjoying the process of maths instead. When maths is taught as open problems, valuing different ideas, or even valuing mistakes, students don’t develop as much maths anxiety, Boaler says. This is called flexible maths thinking.

Ramirez cautions that sometimes this approach can make maths feel more complicated and abstract – so if flexible thinking brings on more anxiety, leave this trick to the side. But for other people, there can be a sense of freedom knowing that multiple maths paths lead to the same destination.

Teach maths to someone else

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the US mathematician Uri Treisman learned that many students were failing calculus classes at the University of California Berkeley. After investigating further, he found that the students who did better were the ones who talked about maths with each other, and did their homework together, which he called collaborative learning.

According to Treisman’s insights, it’s beneficial for students to talk through their maths problems or larger maths concepts together. Even if you’re not a student, there’s a way to use this philosophy to make maths a shared experience and boost your maths confidence. All you need is to learn a basic maths process or principle, and then teach it to someone else.

Flip through an elementary- or middle-school maths book, watch maths lessons online, and then tutor your child, a cousin or a friend’s kid with those problems, Ramirez suggests. ‘Even if they don’t need tutoring,’ he says.

This promotes collaborative learning, and can also increase your sense of ‘self-efficacy’ in maths, which is your belief in your ability to be successful at maths problems. Often, people have a low sense of self-efficacy because of their past experiences, and these memories can follow you around even when you know more maths than you think. Redoing assignments, practising maths that you’re now good at, or helping another person to learn can all help make maths more fun and less anxiety inducing.

Embrace the struggle

Getting over maths anxiety doesn’t mean that maths will never be difficult, or that you’ll become a maths whiz overnight. What’s more important is how you feel about your experience of doing maths. ‘There’s a lot of research showing that your general appraisal of your anxiety plays a huge role in how well you learn and also how much you persist in learning those skills,’ Moore says. Thinking about your anxiety not necessarily as exciting but as a challenge can help.

It’s like public speaking. There are many excellent public speakers who still get nervous before they go on stage, or before talking to groups. ‘Regardless, they’re able to use that physiological response, that arousal as a challenge, and so to go in and really give a good performance out there,’ Moore says.

This is in line with the psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on the benefits of a growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Having a growth mindset involves seeing that competence in a subject isn’t something you’re born with – and that anyone can grow to be better at something. In one of Dweck’s studies , a group of students were given difficult problems to complete; afterwards, the researchers complimented some of them for being smart, and complimented the others for working hard. Those students who had been praised for being smart selected easier follow-up problems to take on than the others. The researchers’ interpretation was that this is because they became concerned with maintaining the appearance of being smart, and didn’t want to get a maths question wrong. The others, who’d been praised for effort, were less concerned about performing well and were up for the challenge of a harder problem. You can do the same: rather than trying to overcome maths anxiety by telling yourself how ‘smart’ you are – which can feel like a fixed trait – praise yourself for your efforts and how much you’re willing to try.

Boaler is eager to disseminate a similar message – that a bit of struggling is good for your brain. ‘If you’re not struggling, if everything is easy, then you’re not getting a good brain workout,’ she says. She even developed a maths app for children called Struggly offering maths and pattern games that are intended to be tricky to solve.

When you change your mindset to embrace the challenge of maths, you might find it can even be fun. ‘We’re hearing from kids who love this app,’ Boaler says. ‘And they’re even saying to each other now: “Will you come and struggle with me today?”’

Remember, the goal is not to be perfect at maths, but to feel less stress during the times you do it. If the pressure and tension around maths lifts, you may discover a new relationship to it. Something you once avoided at all costs could turn out to be a source of fun, or play.

Key points – How to beat maths anxiety

• Maths anxiety is extremely common and it can hold you back. It’s defined as feeling any tension, apprehension or fear that interferes with doing maths or maths performance. If this leads you to avoid maths, it could affect your education and career and cause you stress in everyday life.
• Understand that there is no such thing as a ‘maths person’. There are many myths about maths but one of the most harmful is that only certain people can do it.
• Be aware of and challenge harmful maths stereotypes. There are various misguided cultural beliefs about which groups – based on gender or ethnicity – are better at maths, and these could feed your anxiety. Seek out stereotype-defying role models to help you overcome these unhelpful influences.
• Slow down. The idea that you have to race to complete maths problems can fuel your anxiety. Practise taking your time.
• Write down your feelings. Writing before you do maths may help to unload your anxious thoughts so that they distract you less when actually doing a maths problem.
• Get out of a ‘right or wrong’ mindset. Unlike humanities subjects, maths is often seen as a subject where you’re either right or wrong, and this can create pressure. To counter this way of thinking, spend some time coming up with different ways of solving a simple maths problem – this will help you enjoy the process of maths instead.
• Teach maths to someone else. Helping another person to learn can help make maths more fun and less anxiety inducing.
• Embrace the struggle. Try to adopt a growth mindset and realise that finding maths difficult isn’t a bad thing – it shows you’re giving your brain a workout and you’re improving through practice.

Notice the maths all around you

People tend to think of maths as a unitary thing, Dowker tells me. ‘If someone has difficulty in one particular problem, or some aspect of maths, one starts labelling oneself as no good at maths,’ she says. But the reality is that people can find some kinds of maths easy, and have difficulty in others.

A field called ethnomathematics studies cultural variations within maths, and the different ways that people have come up with quantifying the world around them. In the maths anxiety clinic at Wesleyan, one teacher taught students about a number system, ‘used by the Inkas, which is based on five and involves many different ways of handling symbols’. Zaslavsky developed a course at Teachers College of Columbia University on African mathematics, using information from anthropologists and missionaries on the ways that people counted, and wrote children’s books on the topic too. Learning how other people do maths, and that there isn’t only one right way, can be a tool to achieve that flexible maths thinking that Boaler talked about earlier in this Guide – that is, recognising that there’s often more than one way to solve maths problems.

Maths isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t only what you do inside a classroom either. So try to notice and appreciate all the maths you do throughout daily life, Dowker suggests. For example, maths is present in measuring sugar for cooking or fabric for sewing. It is working out change, spacing out seeds while gardening, doing home carpentry projects, or playing Sudoku on your phone. Maths is all around us in nature, too. Maths explains how the ratio of the Moon’s size to the Sun makes an eclipse possible, the shape that snails’ shells grow in, or how the leaves of ferns contain fractals. Maths is in sports: in the angles of the serves that tennis players hit, in batting averages, or in the statistical likelihood of winning in hockey or horse racing.

By seeing maths in your environment, in all its diversity, it becomes less about achievement or the ‘right answer’, and more about the basic act of understanding quantity, or the way objects are shaped or move through space. As the Indian mathematician Shakuntala Devi once said: ‘Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.’

Links & books

‘How to Learn Math’ is a free online self-paced course from Jo Boaler and Stanford University that confronts maths myths, and teaches you how to start learning maths.

The article ‘Math Anxiety’ (1976) from Ms. magazine is a time capsule that reveals how certain groups, like women, have long been negatively affected by maths stereotypes.

Khan Academy is a US non-profit organisation that provides hundreds of maths lessons online for you to practise at home.

Watch these videos on maths in nature , and how maths can decode art to remind yourself that maths isn’t just a stressful test in school, but all around you.

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Many adults and children feel worried or stressed when faced with maths. Some of us also have physical symptoms too, such as a racing heartbeat, feeling hot and flustered, or sweating.

According to research by the University of Cambridge ,  “Many children and adults experience feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a maths problem.”

Maths anxiety or a fear of maths is common, and although it can limit performance in certain situations and contexts, it’s not linked to intelligence or ability. In one study  involving children, most of those with high maths anxiety scored normal to high results on curriculum maths tests.

Anyone can experience maths anxiety. In fact, according to psychologist Dr Thomas Hunt  of the University of Derby, most adults will experience it at some point, although girls and women are more commonly affected.

What are the signs of maths anxiety?

There isn't a formal test for maths anxiety, but a situation involving maths, or even the thought of doing some maths, can bring on the following symptoms for people with maths anxiety:

• Feeling panicked or stressed
• Feeling flustered or struggling to concentrate on a calculation
• Increased heart rate
• Sweating and nausea 
• Avoiding situations which involve maths

How does it affect people?

Although maths anxiety is often not  a product or indicator of academic achievement, the stress associated with the condition can affect performance in some situations and tests. This can worsen the anxiety, leaving the individual caught in a cycle. This can create or amplify a belief that maths ability is "fixed" and cannot be improved, therefore blocking any motivation to practise in order to learn and progress.

For some people a phobia of maths can lead to avoiding everyday situations involving maths at work or at home, such as helping children with homework. It has also been found to prevent some adults from applying for courses, jobs and promotions.

Tools like the National Numeracy Challenge , can help build confidence with numbers. It has been developed for people with low confidence with numbers or maths anxiety. Give it a try

What causes maths anxiety?

• Pressured situations, such as fearing being judged on how quickly you can produce an answer, or sitting an exam
• Specific negative past experiences, for example having felt humiliated for getting something wrong while in school
• Cultural bias, for example implications from opinions in the media and popular culture that because of background or gender someone is likely to have lower ability in maths

More on maths anxiety in children

Studies have shown that parents and teachers can accidentally play a role in the development of maths anxiety in children. 

There is also evidence that girls tend to have maths anxiety more than boys. This seems to be the case at both primary and secondary school levels, with girls typically having higher levels of general anxiety too. 

Especially in the UK, there is a general feeling that maths is a hard subject and this can also contribute to maths anxiety. Confusion at different teaching methods and testing at SATS level also seem to add to the stress around maths as a subject. 

It's not just the case that children with low maths ability struggle with maths anxiety either. In one study more than three quarters (77%) of children with maths anxiety were normal to high achievers in the subject. 

Maths anxiety can lead to lower performance in tests than a student's true ability warrants. This is just one reason why it needs to be tackled at an early age. 

Being aware of the language we use around maths with children is very important when trying forge a positive relationship with numbers. Get some practical tips on how to talk about maths with children . 

How to deal with maths anxiety

The following approaches can help to address maths anxiety. Dr Hunt explains more about the psychology behind these in  this blog .

Recognising the emotion:  Lots of people experience panic and stress when faced with maths, especially if it’s been a while since doing any. Trying to recognise that it won’t always be this way is important, i.e. that this is the way that you feel now, but not forever.

Making the time:  When ready to give some sums a go, it can help to grab a coffee and get away from everything else for a while. Ideally somewhere relaxed, so it doesn’t feel like a test environment. If time is stretched, doing just ten minutes here and there works well.

Easing into it:  Getting better at maths doesn’t happen overnight, it can be difficult and require persistence. This can be daunting for anyone who experiences maths anxiety. It is important for people to work at their own pace, without the pressure to master a problem straight away. Setting achievable goals, which feel reachable, can help to keep up the motivation while overcoming anxiety.

Talking it through:  In order to overcome maths anxiety, it’s important not to struggle alone. If a first attempt to solve something doesn’t work, it can help to look online or ask a colleague or friend what they would do.

Overcoming maths myths:  Changing the way that we think about numbers can make a real difference to our self-confidence. It is helpful to remember that ability to be good at maths isn’t something we are born with; it can change over time and we can all be good with numbers. 

Dr Tom Hunt - researcher on maths anxiety - has some further advice here

Thousands of learners have found the National Numeracy Challenge a great place to build their confidence with numbers and overcome maths anxiety. It's a free online numeracy website.

Give it a try

Help is available...

The national numeracy challenge.

The National Numeracy Challenge is a free service, provided by National Numeracy, to enable people to build their confidence and competence with numbers. It starts by asking a couple of questions about how you feel about maths and then showing real life stories from others who feel the same. Improving your everyday maths skills does not need to involve going to college.

The National Numeracy Challenge website is used by thousands of adults every month to help them improve their confidence with numbers. It adapts to whatever your current level is, so only gets more challenging when you are ready for it to.

Read stories of people who have overcome maths anxiety

Stacey's story

Mel's story

Oreleo's story

Cathy's story

Further information and articles on maths anxiety

Blog: 'What is maths anxiety?' by Dr Hunt

Blog: 'What can be done to address maths anxiety?' by Dr Hunt

Video: Dr Thomas Hunt - How To Overcome Maths Anxiety

Research: Cambridge University

Advice for parents

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Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics pp 1–36 Cite as

Mind, Brain, and Math Anxiety

• Rachel Pizzie 2  
• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 19 October 2021

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Math anxiety refers to the feelings of anxiety, tension, and negativity associated with mathematical calculations, or anticipating mathematics. Math anxiety is not only associated with negative experiences with math, but is also inversely related to math performance and achievement. Math anxiety is associated with avoidance of mathematics, such that highly math-anxious individuals not only avoid completing math problems, but also avoid math classes, majors, and quantitative careers. Avoidance is an impediment to success in an increasingly quantitative and technological society. Math anxiety provides an interesting perspective from which scientists can explore how cognition and affect come together within one’s educational experience. From the perspective of affective science, math anxiety finds its theoretical grounding in the relation between anxiety and working memory processing. Anxiety theories hypothesize that anxiety about mathematics negatively influences inhibition, disrupting working memory processes and resulting in deficits in processing efficiency of mathematics. In addition to negative emotional experiences and physiological sensations, math anxiety is associated with deficits in mathematical cognition and fundamental numerical skills. Math anxiety is also related to deficits in perception of numerical magnitude, counting, and simple arithmetic processes. Math anxiety represents the study of individual differences in emotional experiences, cognitive processes, and biological mechanisms. Math anxiety brings together the study of minds, brain processes, and educational outcomes. Addressing the negative association between anxiety and education represents an important challenge in improving mathematics education.

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Pizzie, R. (2021). Mind, Brain, and Math Anxiety. In: Danesi, M. (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_29-1

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How to overcome a fear of maths

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It’s fair to say maths is not everyone’s favourite subject. In fact, for many people, the feelings of tension and anxiety that arise when trying to solve a mathematical problem can be all consuming. This is known as maths anxiety – and this feeling of being a failure at maths can affect people’s self-worth for years to come .

For those who suffer with maths anxiety, it can be difficult to shift from a mindset of failure to a more positive outlook when it comes to dealing with numbers. This is why, for many people, maths anxiety can become a lifelong issue.

But research shows that if teachers tackle maths anxiety in the classroom and encourage children to try to approach a problem in a different way – by shifting their mindset – this can be an empowering experience. This is especially the case for pupils from a disadvantaged background.

Mindset theory

US psychology professor, Carol Dweck, came up with the idea of “ mindset theory ”. Dweck realised that people can often be categorised into two groups, those who believe they are bad at something and cannot change, and those who believe their abilities can grow and improve.

This formed the basis of her mindset theory, which states that some people have a “fixed mindset”, meaning they believe their ability to be set in stone and unable to be improved. Other people have a “growth mindset” meaning they believe their ability can change and improve over time with effort and practice.

Jo Boaler, the British education author and professor of mathematics education, applied mindset theory to mathematics, subsequently naming her recommendations “mathematical mindsets”.

She has used this theory to encourage learners to develop a growth mindset in the context of mathematics . The idea is that the problems themselves can help to promote a growth mindset in pupils – without them having to think about their mindset intentionally.

New ways of thinking

But while this all sounds well and good, one of the issues with mindset theory is that it is often presented in terms of brain plasticity or the brain’s ability to grow . This has lead to complaints about a shortage of neurological evidence supporting mindset theory. Our latest research aimed to address this lack of neurological research.

Generally speaking, for every problem in mathematics there is more than one way to solve it. If someone asks you what three multiplied by four is, you can calculate the answer either as 4+4+4 or as 3+3+3+3, depending on your preference. But if you have not developed sufficient mathematical maturity or have maths anxiety, it can prevent you from seeing multiple ways of solving problems . But our new study shows that a “growth mindset” can make maths anxiety a thing of the past.

Read more: Maths: six ways to help your child love it

We measured participants’ motivation to solve mathematical problems by asking about motivation both before and after each problem was presented. We also measured participants’ brain activity, specifically looking at areas associated with motivation, while they solved each problem. This was done using an electroencephalogram (EEG) which records patterns of activation across the brain.

In our research, we phrased questions in different ways to assess how question structure may affect both our participants’ ability to answer the questions and their motivation while tackling maths problems.

Each question appeared in two formats: one of typical mathematical teaching and another adhering to the recommendations of mathematical mindset theory. Both questions asked essentially the same question and had the same answer, like in the following simplified example:

“Find the number which is the sum of 20,000 and 30,000 divided by two” (a typical mathematical problem) and “Find the midpoint number between 20,000 and 30,000” (an example of a mathematical mindset problem).

Growth mindsets

Our study provides two important findings.

The first is that participants’ motivation was greater when solving mathematical mindset versions of problems compared to the standard versions – as measured by their brain response when solving the problems. It is assumed this is because the mathematical mindset wording encourages students to treat numbers as points in the space and manipulate spatial constructions.

The second is that participants’ subjective reports of motivation were significantly decreased after attempting the more standard maths questions.

Our research is immediately actionable in that it shows how opening up problems so that there are multiple methods to solving them, or adding a visual component, allows learning to become an empowering experience for all students.

So for people with maths anxiety, you will be relieved to know that you are not innately “bad” at maths and your ability is not fixed. It is actually just a bad habit you have developed due to bad teaching. And the good news is, it can be reverted.

• Maths study
• Maths skills
• Growth mindset
• maths problem
• Maths ability
• fixed mindset
• maths anxiety

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Understanding mathematics anxiety

| October 2013 - February 2019

Researchers: Dr Denes Szucs | Dr Ros McLellan ...

• Dr Denes Szucs University of Cambridge
• Dr Ros McLellan University of Cambridge
• Dr Ann Dowker University of Oxford

Project overview

Learning mathematics can be challenging; however, not all mathematics difficulties result from cognitive difficulties. Some children and adults have mathematics anxiety (MA) which severely disrupts their performance.

MA is a debilitating emotional reaction to mathematics that is increasingly recognised in psychology and education. It has been defined as “a feeling of tension and anxiety that interferes with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in ordinary life and academic situations”. MA ranges from feelings of mild tension to a strong fear of mathematics. MA is not restricted to test or classroom settings, with the result that those affected develop a severe avoidance of situations involving any kinds of mathematics. They may not choose careers involving the application of mathematics, even if cognitively they would be perfectly capable of good mathematics development.

This study will provide an in-depth understanding of the emotional roots of MA in primary and secondary school children. The researchers will also characterize the relation of MA and general anxiety and links to mathematics performance, and develop robust MA questionnaires.

Firstly, the researchers will assess the prevalence of MA and its relation to mathematical performance and test anxiety in a sample of 1,000 primary pupils (followed from Year 4 to 5) and 1,000 secondary pupils (followed from Year 7 to 8). They will then interview a sub-sample of 120 primary and 120 secondary school pupils (half with high MA and half without), to help obtain a fuller picture of childhood triggers, experiences and coping mechanisms.

The project will raise awareness of MA among teachers, parents and psychologists. The results will enable us to identify the triggers of MA and to understand everyday experience and coping mechanisms in MA and the interaction of anxiety and performance. This information will be useful in determining how MA can be avoided, how existing MA can be alleviated and how positive attitudes towards mathematics can be promoted.

Latest on this project

Early intervention is key to breaking ‘vicious circle’ of maths anxiety.

Three-quarters (77%) of children with high maths anxiety are normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests, according to Nuffield-funded research from the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge. 

Publications

• Project website https://www.cne.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/themes/ma
• Full report - Understanding Mathematics Anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/290514/Szucs%2041179%20-%20Main%20Public%20Output%208%20March%202019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y 01 March 19
• Executive summary - Understanding Mathematics Anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. University of Cambridge. 1MB | pdf | 01 March 19
• Cognitive and Emotional Math Problems Largely Dissociate: Prevalence of Developmental Dyscalculia and Mathematics Anxiety. Journal of Educational Psychology. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-48096-001
• Differentiating anxiety forms and their role in academic performance from primary to secondary school. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174418 28 March 17
• The Modified Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale: A Valid and Reliable Instrument for Use with Children. Frontiers in Psychology. [Free questionnaire] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00011/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Psychology&id=229375 19 January 17
• The Chicken or the Egg? The Direction of the Relationship Between Mathematics Anxiety and Mathematics Performance. Frontiers in Psychology. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01987/full 07 January 16
• Maths anxiety in primary and secondary school students: Gender differences, developmental changes and anxiety specificity. Learning and Individual Differences. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608016300164 01 May 16
• Math anxiety and developmental dyscalculia: A study on working memory processes. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13803395.2015.1066759 27 August 15

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