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Math Anxiety Affects Skills As Basic As Counting
thirty-seven writes "According to four Canadian psychologists, a study they have conducted shows that math anxiety, 'the feeling of fear and dread of performing mathematical calculations,' can negatively affect mathematical tasks much simpler and more basic than previously thought. In the study, participants were asked to count black squares on a white screen. The number of squares shown ranged from one to nine and participants were given as much time as they wanted before answering. When the number of squares was in the subitizing range (one to four), both math-anxious and non-math-anxious participants performed equally well, but when the number of squares was in the counting range (five to nine), the math-anxious group took longer and were less accurate. The University of Waterloo's news release about the study includes this interesting note: 'Previous studies have shown that a weakness in basic math abilities has a greater negative effect on employment opportunities than reading difficulties [do].'"
Isn't it obvious that the fear of something will have an impact even on the simplest things where something relative to that fear is involved ?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I would imagine that someone that was very bad at math would be anxious about having to use their weakened mathematical ability.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Sort of, this is a pretty damn simple task. Would you really have guessed that somebody who was math anxious would have trouble counting to 9?
I guess this explains why so many "first post"s actually aren't...
Oh my god! That calc test on surface integrals is scaring me! How many days do I have until I have to take it? Let's see, one, two, four? Shit, shit! Let's start over. One, two, three, where was I? Oh god, how did I make it this far? Was this all some sort of ruse to make me feel good about myself? Has my whole life so far been a lie? How can I major in CS if I can't even count! If only I had learned that I was terribly afraid of math all those years ago....I think there is only one way out of here: majoring in education or running for office. Or is that two? Dammit, there we go again!
SSC
There...are...four...lights!
Deciding whether the conditional argument of a for loop should be i < size or i < (size - 1) when programming.
My impression, through my own experience and people I have spoken to, is that maths is hard to learn because it is generally abstract. For example I get the general feeling that more people pass calculus when they are given an application that help provide a visual context to the skill, such as physics. This is probably the same reason why computers sometimes detract people from using them. The only difference is that we spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to make computers easy, though I am not sure the same can be said about mathematics.
Having sat through a number of maths classes, and lectures, I find that the people teaching the subject, often fail to appreciate that what they find easy is not necessarily the case for others. This means they don't show the necessary steps or fail to find techniques to facilitate the understanding. Sometimes its almost as if they want to make maths hard to learn. Of course people end up get anxious since they end up feeling stupid.
Although we talk about car analogies here, in order to make things easy to understand to the, I find the same can benefit maths. By trying to understand what the skill set of your audience is and adapting the teaching helps. For example the 'sum' sign looks hard until (if amongst computer people) you explain its just a 'for each' with addition and the 'pi' sign is a 'for each' with multiplication. In certain cases it is equivalent to the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, in that they both can talk about the same thing, but the way in which they do so is not the same.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I think the issue is one of confidence. If you do math on a daily basis, or even have to count things as in this study on a daily basis with the knowledge that you must be right, you'll be more confident in your final answer because you're used to it. Put a guy from a machine shop that has to count 1000 drill bits before he ships them to make sure the shipping order is precise, and he'll top that study.
If you can't count to 9, you shouldn't be in university.
Implement that rule and you'll have to close liberal arts departments everywhere.
You say that as if it was a bad thing..
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I do voulenteer work for a non-profit organization helping high-school kids with their homework, and with the kids who aren't that confident with math there's always these really simple mistakes - at least when I'm sitting there helping them/watching what they're writing. Suddenly 4+4 isn't 8, and 1/2 isn't 0,5... when I point these things out, it's obvious that they really do know these things. They're just stressed out, and that's what keeping them from performing. For a lot of these kids the same thing happens during tests. They kind of blank out and do weird things that they wouldn't normally do (I'm still talking math here...). I would imagine that standing there with lots of psychologists observing you counting these squares would make people stressed out... I for one would wonder what trick they were trying to pull - how is this a trick question? No wonder it takes someone who's not confident with math a little time to answer. But hey, this is perhaps exactly what they were trying to show with all this. So there ya go.
I wonder how much better they would perform if each correct response was earning them $50. Some people just won't follow even the most basic kind of instructions unless they are strongly and personally motivated.
The experiment sounds more like it highlights performance anxiety. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't equate simple "counting" with Math. Once you start doing something with the number you've counted, then it's Math.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have NEVER been able to do arithmetic well, but did ok at most types of math as long as there were no numbers! Of course I never went much beyond ordinary differential equations.
Hey, maybe those people are "anxious" about math because they're the ones that never did their math homework!
Maybe they were yelled at and threatened with violence when doing their math homework. Which made them distraught and unable to perform mathematically, which led to bad grades, which led to more yelling.
I know you'll dismiss that, since you're obviously devoid of empathy and compassion, but I thought I'd try to enlighten you anyway.
You can't take the sky from me...
Math anxiety is turning out to be a much more complicated phenomena than one might thing. For example, there also was a very interesting study by Sian Beilock at the University of Chichago. Beilock showed that young girls who were exposed to female elementary school teachers were much more likely to develop math anxiety themselves than those not exposed to such teachers. See http://hpl.uchicago.edu/Publications/PNAS_2010.pdf. The exact consequences of Beilock's study are not clear. But combined with the study above, it seems to suggest that we need to do a better job with elementary school teachers. We need to either get rid of the school teachers with math anxiety or get rid of their math anxiety problems. Possibly some combination of both approaches may be in order: Improve the mathematical confidence of elementary school teachers whom we can effect and get rid of those we can't.
This is the first time on Slashdot that I'll that say there's a legitimate call for "correlation is not causation". The claim in the article is that "anxiety about mathematics can adversely affect tasks as simple as basic counting". But the reported data is simply that "math anxious individuals, relative to their non-math anxious peers, demonstrated a deficit in the counting range (five to nine)..."
I don't see any support for the hypothesis that math anxiety "affects" or "impacts" (per the article) basic math tasks. I think an equally-well supported hypothesis is that people who suck at counting to 5 wind up developing math anxiety.
To test their hypothesis, they need to take equally-skilled people and somehow make an experimental group anxious about the upcoming task (or something). I don't see that happening here. Frankly, I'm highly skeptical of this whole "math anxiety" postulate. I think we've got to accept the fact that for some people, even basic arithmetic is monumentally difficult, and not blame it on their "feelings" towards the task.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The idea that some people have a hard time with math is nothing new, but understanding what makes it difficult is important. If math anxiety affects people at such a basic level, addressing their anxiety could create a huge improvement. It would be interesting if we learn enough about how people learn that some day average math skills means a strong grasp of algebra and calculus without needing a calculator.
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Curious. I would think knowing how to write a memo that wasn't two or more pages long would have been the requirement.
May the Maths Be with you!
This kind of anxiety has also been shown to cause behavior that confirms stereotypes. For example, if girls are told that they can't succeed in math, then they'll get more anxious than the boys before math tests and score lower: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070524082806.htm
I've always had trouble with math, not so much understanding it but actually doing it. It got worse over the years, not just with harder math, but any math. Eventually I could tell I was actually having anxiety attacks when asked simple math questions. Now days these anxiety attacks are actually bad enough to trigger my flight-or-fight response. It's overwhelming and hard to describe, but if I don't focus entirely on calming down, it feels like I will 'lose control'. At this point the problem makes itself worse - I can be asked something I KNOW how to solve but I end up having to concentrate so hard on self control that I can't even take time to think about the problem I was asked. Not being able to think about the problem means I can't answer it, which makes the anxiety worse, which makes it even more impossible to stop and think about the math itself.
It's been pretty crippling, both socially and in work. I do everything I can to avoid situations that will be problematic. I simply stone wall anyone who tosses math at me, shutting down with simple 'no's and 'I can't's, leading them to assume I'm unintelligent and/or uneducated - an assumption I let them have because it's easier than trying to explain what's really going on.
I've never encountered anyone who even remotely understood, so I thought it was just me having an odd, unfortunate personality quirk. I mean nerds and anxiety go hand in hand right?
Maybe I'm not alone...
Maybe they were yelled at and threatened with violence when doing their sex ed. homework. Which made them distraught and unable to perform sexually, which led to bad sex, which led to more masterbating.
Too easy.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
"Psychologists are great at making excuses for everything."
Yes, it's a tough life for a psychopath these days. How can one manipulate people if everybody else is so empathetic?
I know you'll dismiss that, since you're obviously devoid of empathy and compassion, but I thought I'd try to enlighten you anyway.
No I'm more of a results oriented person who believes that dwelling on the past is not constructive to future progress. The past exists to be learned from, not lived in. My own past is full of very real nightmares and ghosts, things have happened to me that make everyone who finds out gasp in amazement. The key to survival is getting over it, not using it as an excuse for a "handicap". A person who has so called "math anxiety" and is determined enough can get past it. Or they can wallow in it and use it as an excuse to lead mediocre lives following the path of least resistance. Life is full of choices. Perhaps I am educating YOU.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Study showed that 24% of all accounting graduates could not even READ a 2-page memo. So what happens when you get one who can't read AND can't count to 10?
Trust me on this one, there are some things that take more than a page to properly explain.
Maybe if people stopped constantly telling kids how difficult math is, there wouldn't be so much related anxiety and self inflicted doubt.
As a grad student (in mathematics) at a liberal arts uni, I teach a low level math class every semester and I also sit through two hours a week of 'help sessions,' where undergrads in any of the low level math classes (from 'College Algebra'--essentially algebra 2--up through calc) can come in and ask questions about homework, past quizzes/tests, general topics, etc. as part of my funding. Being that it is a liberal arts uni, the majority of the undergrads I deal with are most definitely NOT science/math/engineering majors. So, half of the time I spend either teaching or in these help sessions basically amounts to me listening to kids tell me how bad they are at math and how much it scares them...after which, I usually get to play therapist and reassure them that it really isn't that bad. Once they get past the general hysteria and start thinking in a halfway logical manner, they usually pick up on what's going on pretty quickly. Most of them, at least after they've stopped trying to convince themselves that math is some evil entity out to eat them, even comment on how easy it really is. If people would just stop spreading baseless hysteria, I'm pretty sure we'd all be a whole hell of a lot better off.
Yeah, I just can't count the number of times I was too stressed out to do math...
I'd have to argue that if you can't write a memo in under 2 pages you shouldnt be in a university.
Then it is no longer a memo...
There's no set format to the length of a memo.
And you'd be wrong.
Memo is just slang for "memorandum", which can be as short or as long as required. Just head over to Groklaw and look at the various filings. Gee, look - multi-page memos.
Memos can be quite detailed, including all sorts of things, such as who was present, who discussed each point raised, what agreements were reached, justifications for same, etc.
Between the beer and a thc count so high, it would raise Jerry Garcia from the dead, you might have something.
However while i was in my technician class, the math was killer. i was ok using my text-book.
The minute I had to use the calculator that is part of the course I went for a shit.
The idea that I might have the same issues makes more sense.
Not that I am an idiot, just forgot how poor my math is.
Not too mention I am Canadian
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The schools lost the ability to teach mathematics properly a couple of decades ago, starting with the "new math" in grade school and the "dumbing down" of math in high school.
Grading to the curve just sealed the deal. But like a bad TV infomercial - BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! By insisting that students solve all problems using calculators, students lost the ability to guestimate what range an answer should be in. We see the effects of this today, from cashiers unable to make change to people not realizing that the "answer" they got is obviously off by several orders of magnitude.
I'm not saying slide rules were all that great - but to use one you at least had to have some idea of what range your answer should be in before you did the calculations.
Nothing helps you get over an anxiety problem like people telling you you're just lazy, let me tell you. You're just not working hard enough, stupid! Only an hour or two (or three) on your math homework? And you still haven't made any progress? You'll sit there all night until you miraculously figure it all out, dummy!
And every time you look down at that sheet you break into a cold sweat. You get a head full of fog, and every stab at every problem is like groping around blindly. You desperately flip through your notes or pour over the text book, both of which are like trying to read Cyrillic. And all the while, everyone else in the class blazes through the material, leaving you far behind. It's because you're not trying hard enough. Work harder, moron.
Gamertag: WyleType
I happen to be one of these people, so I have some knowledge about the subject. Although I cannot speak for everyone, in my cause there was a very strong correlation between my fear of math (or my lack of math ability) and my performance. At a younger age (elementary school) I simply found math to be non-practical, and therefore ignored it(which is to say I did the bare minimum to get by in class). Once I did this however, by the time I got to highschool, I had severely fallen behind in math all around. My first and only class I failed was algebra, which I retook and finally passed with a C. To me, it was such an abstract thing that it seemed pointless in its difficulty. I should qualify that in all other subjects I excelled, including things like networking (boolean functions and binary, that I saw had practical benifit, I could do in my head no problem) Now, after serving in the military, and going back to college, it has been over 7 years since I had a college level math course, and still struggle, but I have found something that helps me tremendously. Finding practical applications that require whatever level of math I'm studying. My main tool for this at the moment, however bizarre this may sound, is building things in Garry's Mod, via the Wire Mod tool. It requires some very complicated mathmatical procedures to do something such as build a 10 cyclinder engine wiring to fire off in the correct sequence at high speed. In short, I believe it is a matter of learning types, I am a visual/kinetic learner, and need some substantial problem to wrap my head around and things have slowly (not without hard work) falling into place for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in a similar situation.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
I use and even sometimes teach factor analysis, item response theory (Rasch and multiparameter), structural equation modeling (okay, so most of those are flavors of the same thing), as well as a whole host of other statistical analyses. But as I prepare to go back to grad school for a PhD, and therefore need the GRE again, I'm struck--yet again--how absolute shit I am at arithmetic. Questions that require me to just manipulate variables around are no problem, but if they throw an actual value in there, and I have to work on that with scratch paper, I have to be REEEEALLY slow and careful, because I make more stupid arithmetic errors than anyone I know.
I also joke (but not joking, really) that I can't count. I'll count something 3 times and come up with a different number. I'm terrible. Terrible.
Writing code in R is easier for me than the multiplication table.
However, as an applied linguist, I also know quite a bit about another cognitive activity, and I think I've noticed a pattern. When I'm learning a new language, I tear through the grammar and make very few mistakes. But vocabulary? It's here and then it's gone. I study the same words over and over and over again, and they just don't stick. It's embarrassing.
So what do these two things have in common? Working in code, moving variables around, and human language grammar are all procedural knowledge. They are "processing"-intensive. Numbers, the multiplication table, and vocabulary are all stored, static knowledge. They are memory-intensive. So if I'm bad at those things, perhaps we would expect that I would also have a terrible memory, right.
Guess what? I live by lists and notes to myself. I have a memory like a sieve. I first started doing this with my research--taking detailed notes on everything I did--because I once realized when I was done prepping, carrying out, and interpreting a particularly labor-intensive analysis of some of my data, that I had just done it the previous weekend, and just... forgot. Luckily, my findings were the same both times. Sometimes I find things that I've written to myself and I have no recollection of writing them, but I know my handwriting, so I just do what they say. Seriously. I'm like the guy from Memento.
So at the heart of this whole "math anxiety" thing, I think, we might just have different cognitive styles at work here. I'm a university researcher. I'm not dumb. I've turned out fine, by doing the things I'm bad at in a way that takes advantage of things I'm good at. You know, like everyone does all the time. What might make people anxious about math is that--and this is coming from a professional tester (what do you think "item response theory" is for?)--we assess it in a very one-dimensional way that does not "bias for best" (a saying in the testing community--design tests that allow the examinee to show off their best, because that's what we're really interested in).
In the US, at least, we have a really flawed way of teaching and assessing math skills--one which, I think, leads a lot of people to quit because they think they can't do it, or that it's boring. Math is no more boring than stirring a bowl, and everyone loves cake. It's just a means to an end, but we never get the actual cake in the school system, so people get all worried about stirring and finally just end up buying cake from the store and saying "wow, you must be really good at stirring"--when the pros use machines for that crap.
So, to sum up, I don't actually think we have an "anxiety" problem. People are anxious because they think they suck at math. They think they suck at math because they suck at math. But sucking at math might be due to totally benign cognitive style differences that are easily routed around. --If we can fix our pedagogical and assessment approaches to math education, I think you'll see this "anxiety" disappear, and find that most people can handle math-intensive tasks if they are presented them in a better, and more realistic, way.
Psychologists might like the answer to be "Therapy"; but, even if they explicitly say so, I doubt it'll make much difference.
Basic anti-anxiety techniques can easily be administered by people much cheaper than psychologists(generic social workers, pretty much any teacher or aide with a little training) and there is a collection of anti-anxiety drugs with fairly favorable safety profiles that can be handed out by anybody who can write a prescription(which, if the experience with things like Ritalin is any indication, will sometimes be a fancy psychiatrist; but will more often just be the family doctor). Drilling math problems, especially low-level arithmetic, is a task practically tailor-made for computers(and software for the purpose has already entered the educational market).
A few psychologists will probably pick up lucrative gigs administering soothing words and flashcards to the spawn of the neurotic upper middle class for $150/hour; but(assuming that the research holds up) that is going to be a very niche treatment model. Everybody else will get 10 minutes of breathing exercises or a benzo and then a trip to the computer lab. And, frankly, I'd be delighted if a few rounds of that is all it takes. Widespread innumeracy isn't a good thing and, if we sit around waiting for people to just snap out of it, we'll be waiting a while.
If you can't count to 9, you shouldn't be in university.
Implement that rule and you'll have to close liberal arts departments everywhere.
You say that as if it was a bad thing..
If you do, who's going to deliver the pizzas to the computer labs?
No, no, you got it wrong!
Posts that claim to be "first" but aren't usually are in the "subitizing range" (you see, I not only did read the fscking summary but also borrowed a link from it).
These people actually have the much feared Reverse Math Anxiety Syndrome (RMAS). People with RMAS suck at dealing with numbers up to four, but are very good with numbers from five upwards. Have you ever seen the 137th post claiming to be first?
Maybe you should consider the methodology of the study and the literature review and previous research it was built on. You don't conduct a psychological study by surveying psychologists.
I can't tell if you're just nitpicking at the headline or ignorant of the scientific method.
I'm a high-school teacher (16-18 year olds) and can confirm this. When I get my students I work really hard on teaching them to relax during math tests. Mainly by going around chatting, drawing stupid stuff on the whiteboard and just generally being bored. I estimate this improves math grades by around half a point (on a scale from 1 to 6, where the entire scale is actually used). Grades jump up by atleast 1 grade when I take over classes though. The rest I attribute to me being awsome.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Well, what if someone *is* lazy? Exercises start at the easiest levels. Chapter 2 is too hard for you? Then you need to do all the Chapter 1 exercises! If you just skip to Chapter 3 and find it too difficult don't blame others.
Instead of math anxiety causing people to be bad at math. Maybe they have math anxiety because they are bad a math?
The schools lost the ability to teach mathematics properly a couple of decades ago, starting with the "new math" in grade school
You're evidently not in a position to discuss mathematics pedagogy. Many major mathematical discoveries were found by mathematicians trained in that "New Math" in the 1960s. Mathematics is the art understanding problems in terms of logical constraints, and formulae that satisfy them. You don't teach that by counting, or even adding or subtracting. You need to jump into an undecidable language to do that, like Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, or Peano Arithmetic, or Logo or another Lisp.
and the "dumbing down" of math in high school.
The "dumbing down" of math in high school amounts to using the "Old Math" techniques of rote memorization of formulas, applied to the domain of calculus and geometry. Pick one. You can't have it both ways.
After all, I am strangely colored.
New discoveries in math have nothing to do with the average high school graduate not being able to make change at the 7-11.
These new discoveries were not made by high school students who can't count.
So, your point is not relevant to the issue, any more than crediting the declining ability of people to string coherent sentence together can be credited to the flourishing of new genres of science fiction.
I have seriously sucked at math my whole life. In grade school I was put in the "special" math class. In high school I flunked Algebra. In community college I barely passed Pre-algebra and despite being highly motivated and studying really hard failed Algebra 1. In retrospect it doesn't make sense that I should be so dumb in this are and so very smart in some others. I know that I get incredibly anxious even thinking about math. Perhaps I need to conquer that anxiety so I can at least get through the basic math requirement for a BA!
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I'm a successful programmer, but have always had math anxiety. Don't ask me to split the restaurant bill or work out the change at the supermarket. But I've always been great with algebra - symbols, equations, love em. Numbers, can't do em. Maybe it's money anxiety. :)
I think it stems back to school - having to stand up in class and answer math questions. I found it very awkward and stressful doing that, and the feeling returns when I'm put on the spot to answer a math question. I think everyone has areas of confidence and areas of self-doubt which affects their abilities.
Perhaps it comes down to that trite saying - believe in yourself and you will succeed! In this case, it probably applies. The fact I don't believe I'll be right makes me fail. Yoda would not be pleased.