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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 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
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.
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."
Certainly. If you actually have a phobia of something, the smallest notion can affect you. Actually, what surprises me is that counting to four does not affect them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I doubt it's that simple. It's like saying that lacking piloting skills affects your fear of flying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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...
That's because one doesn't have to count to four; one just sees the items as 'four of them'.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Yeah, I just can't count the number of times I was too stressed out to do math...
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"
There are 5 lights!
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.
Certainly. If you actually have a phobia of something, the smallest notion can affect you.
I don't think that math anxiety is a "phobia" for most people; it is milder and much more widespread among the general population, I think. Wikipedia (not an authoritative source for definitions of psychology terms, I know) says a phobia is "an intense and persistent fear" and that mathematical anxiety is "anxiety about one's ability to do mathematics" and anxiety is an "unpleasant feeling that is typically associated with uneasiness, fear, or worry."
So it does surprise me that the kind of self-defeating attitude that leads people to decide that they can't learn trig or shouldn't bother learning how to divide fractions also affects something as basic as counting to nine. It also surprises me that it seems that people, on some level, think of such basic counting as "math". I know, of course, that counting is math, but it surprises me that people would lump such basic counting in with the type of math that they should dread doing.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I've often wondered what would happen if you took a standard school intake class, gave them a short all-purpose test, told them they'd all passed with 95%+, and spent the rest of the year treating them like geniuses. To this day, I'm convinced that I am no smarter than my classmates were, but because I read books I was "the smart one" and hence I did end up doing better.
[FUCK BETA]