Slashdot Mirror
Kids Have 'Math Anxiety' Thanks To Parents and Teachers, Report Finds (vice.com)
A new report out of the University of Cambridge studied the experiences of a total of 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy and found that primary and secondary school girls had higher levels of both math anxiety and general anxiety than boys. "The study also focuses on how parents and teachers shape math performance and attitudes, perhaps without even realizing it," adds Motherboard. "In the same way that anxious parents can shape their children's anxiety, math-anxious mentors can shape how kids view their own math anxiety." From the report: The new study builds on previous research by highlighting the importance of teachers and parents' own math anxieties impacting students. Most students that the researchers talked to said that their anxiousness started when the math topics became more challenging, and they felt like they couldn't do them. Another reason the students' said they were struggling was because multiple teachers were teaching them math, and it became confusing across teaching styles. "Importantly -- and surprisingly -- this new research suggests that the majority of students experiencing maths anxiety have normal to high maths ability," Josh Hillman, Director of Education at the Nuffield Foundation, said in a press release.
Several of the excerpts of the interviews conducted by researchers with math-anxious kids are heartbreaking: Many described feelings that they knew the answers but panicked, or tried to battle through initial confusion. One child, around 9 or 10 years old, said: "Once, I think it was the first day and he picked on me, and I just kind of burst into tears because everybody was staring at me and I didn't know the answer. Well I probably knew it but I hadn't thought it through." Another described doing a fractions test: "It means like enormously [nervous], and enormously means like massively... I felt very unwell and I was really scared and because my table's in the corner, I kind of just like tried to not be in the lesson."
Several of the excerpts of the interviews conducted by researchers with math-anxious kids are heartbreaking: Many described feelings that they knew the answers but panicked, or tried to battle through initial confusion. One child, around 9 or 10 years old, said: "Once, I think it was the first day and he picked on me, and I just kind of burst into tears because everybody was staring at me and I didn't know the answer. Well I probably knew it but I hadn't thought it through." Another described doing a fractions test: "It means like enormously [nervous], and enormously means like massively... I felt very unwell and I was really scared and because my table's in the corner, I kind of just like tried to not be in the lesson."
5 in AP Calculus, better than I did. Don't tell me girls can't do math.
What is something we all felt in high school?
But, math anxiety? Wow. If it existed, I rather convincingly suspect it was in back of dozens of other, considerably more important at the moment, social concerns.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...because I was frustrated and bored to tears, locked into the same pace as everybody else. There were more stupid doodles in my notebook than actual notes.
Most of the stuff I know I've taught myself.
As for math anxiety, maybe they need to find a way to get rid of the popular image of the 1950s nerd with the taped up glasses and hiked up pants. This 'nerd' is associated with everything considered smart.
No anxiety from my daughter in elementary school. Had to do long division. We used M&Ms and she got to eat the remainder. Dad had to plan the problems carefully to attain remainders less than 5.
because the kids are learning math differently (circles and lines everywhere, aka 'common core') than their parents did... and their parents can't help them with their homework -- and even worse, when they do, kids homework and tests get marked wrong, even though the answer, and the work to get there, is absolutely and totally correct.
Once, I think it was the first day and he picked on me, and I just kind of burst into tears because everybody was staring at me and I didn't know the answer.
Not quite the same thing but there's no crying in Mathematics!
In the 1990s, the high school I attended didn't really teach math. Instead, it pushed people into groups and immediately threw them into the work with the expectation that the group could figure it out themselves. It was a rare day that the teacher actually lectured.
Meanwhile, real math teachers are ignored, because their strategy of actually teaching the math doesn't let schools artificially tamper with the scores.
If you want to get rid of math anxiety, a good first step would be to actually teach, not let everyone sink like a stone.
Maybe they should listen to Death Metal while doing homework to reduce that anxiety...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
with a smartphone... lol.
[($)]
Part of it is because of constantly changing the way students are taught to do math. Especially as their parents cannot help them if they don't understand. I learned math in the 60s and 70s. There was nothing wrong with the way we were taught, and students today should be taught the same way! A couple of years ago a friend's grandchildren were trying to learn division. Their teacher was having them try to do it some weird and torturous way. I showed them how I learned to do long division, and they remarked how much easier it was than the method that they were being taught.
I know that these days everyone has a phone, tablet or a computer with a calculator program. That does not help if the person does not know how to properly formulate the problem.
The described situation is social anxiety. Any connection to math is purely incidental.
Actual math anxiety stems wholly from the fact that any sane person would be anxious if you told them you were going to force them to practice various riffs on elementary algebra for twelve years and call it "math."
Will sort out the smart students from the average and well below average.
Allow the really smart to enter the more advanced math classes.
Put the average and well below average into math classes with math set to their ability.
The best students get to college on merit and ability.
The average and well below average get to study math they can understand.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is a teaching failure not anxiety. The anxiety is the result of bad teaching. When I was being taught math the teacher would have us work the problem, then ask us to come to the blackboard to work the problem.
But, if we don't want to blame the teacher, and we can't blame the kid.... got to blame something else.
The problem is that the articles all seem to be calling Arithmetic "maths". When did simple arithmetic become mathematics?
It's long been known that when kids are learning math:
* They have family who generally have had bad experiences when they learned math.
* They have teachers in their early years without the interest, ability, or confidence to teach math
The message comes across loud and and clear - math is hard/confusing/not for mere mortals.
Well, you could use more is a) the selection was better and b) there was more real-world connection.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What the hell is "social anxiety" and what does it have to do with math?
I don't respond to AC's.
The pacing of math is wrong for the vast majority of kids. Many are bored to death, just as many are confused and barely skating through. But our math education is all laid out on a rigid timeline. We need to not just get of rid of the idea of grades (4th grade math is a stupid concept), but we also need to actively collect dumb students and smart students into their own groups early on.
Math education should simply be standardized tests that you can take when you feel ready. Any other form of grading or advancement will inevitably lead to a poor education for the majority of the students.
Liberal agenda? I think it would be news to most that people like the Rockefellers were liberals.
Still useless. The only math you need to use is the basics. Addition, subtraction, and stuff like that. All the rest of it is useless BULLSHIT that liberals have made up out of thin air in order to act smug around the rest of us and fool stupid goverment burocrats to give them BILLIONS in funding. No one uses it, NOTHING benefits from it existing. Math is stupid and useless liberal propaganda.
Maybe kids have trouble with math because they're taught that their unrefined and subjective emotions are significant. The apologist author of this paper seems be afflicted by the same problem.
Nice try, John Birch Society faggot.
You can't go from "we proved girls experience general anxiety more than boys" to "math teachers are to blame for girls having more anxiety over math than boys"!
I know you mean well. I know you solution of just passing tests seems like it would make sense to many as logical and reasonable. It would to me too if I had spent close to zero hours on the other side of the desk. Certainly not in a k-12 setting. Your idea does have some merits in a perfect world, but as it is we live in a resource limited world.
We do not structure our classes the way we do because they are the most effective for learning. We do it so the most kids can be reached per staffing dollar. Your class format would simply be unteachable. Kids often need help and explanations for each topic. Non-mathy kids (most) struggle with texts. If you personalize lessons to each kid, then you would need an incredible amount of teachers. Maybe as a society if we truly valued education, we could afford this. The bald truth is we do not. So, we don't.
In private schools, they do what really works which is have smaller, homogenous classes of about 10-14. This is good because students really do learn well from talking to each other. You can also read body language and give fast help as needed. This type of intervention is probably closest to what the OP meant.
The seriously bad mistake that has been introduced into the class since you have been in school is the idea of differentiated learning. Some genius had the idea it is more important to make kids feel good instead of actually teaching them at their level. So, math classes are no longer tracked in any meaningful way until late junior high. All kids of all ability levels are in the same room. The teacher is supposed to come up with lessons to reach all students. Which means you have to cater to less strong students. The average students quickly learn to play dumb so they get less work or at least easier stuff. The brighter kids just get bored.
The one year I was in this system, I had honors kids mixed with special ed. It was not effective for anyone. The thing is, the special needs kid could learn math, but you had to go slower and re-explain. If he was with similar ability, then he could have advanced well. Since he was outclassed by most of his peers, he felt like a bother, which made it harder to reach him because he did not want his friends to get impatient. I truly loathe the administrators who came up with this scheme. It was so frustrating.
The best solution is to probably reduce class sizes to levels like private schools. Sadly, I do not foresee this happening. The other factor is that the U.S. spends more per student than any one else. What you might have never heard is that more than a lion's share of that funding goes into administration. So, even if you offer more, it won't go to the kids. If we want change, we need to change the culture of the schools and how they are ran. I am very pessimistic about such a change because there is way to much money being made by way to many. That sort of corruption is hard to conquer.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
It's a problem that's been with us for a while.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Students unprepared for exams, have anxiety. When unprepared for a mathematics exam, they have greater anxiety. Other subjects use English where one can waffle somewhat: Mathematics has its own words, where the grammar is loose but the expressions must be precise. That makes a lack of preparation, terrifying.
It's the thing everybody should be learn but nobody teaches; failure is good.
Failure helps you see the mistakes you make and teaches you how to do better next time.
The only people who don't fail are people who don't even try to succeed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
Seriously, Wikipedia is a site where everyone posts what they think with little oversight but UD it's a joke site, that doesn't even try to be a serious definition.
In Argentina, during the last right wing, US backed, dictatorship set theory was also removed from elementary school.
The reasoning was (translation is mine) that it 'promotes the Soviet idea of the collective, and of grouping as an indispensable relationship in problem solving'. I wonder how much of red scare factor was behind the similar move in the US.
Mathematics is quite a complex subject, but thanks to the knowledge of formulas and rules, you can solve mathematical examples somehow. Personally, I have always experienced problems with academic papers and only now have found a solution. Getting A+ becomes easier, if you go to the website of a professional writing service and Buy Essays Online.
Your feelings and opinions are meaningless, there is a clearly defined process and (at lower levels) a distinct right/wrong analysis
Young people are not used having their feelings and opinions catered to at every turn, the anxiety comes from being told "shut the f**k up, this is how it is"
"Maths." Ugh. The s in the word suggests plural. Mathematics is not a plural, therefore, it should shorten to math. Why are English people, who claim superiority in the language, make such a ridiculous error in a word? I get that American's have bastardized the language, but show some fucking COMMON SENSE!
Well, the Rockefellers were never socialists, to be sure. But "Rockefeller Republicans" is (or at least used to be) shorthand for the liberal wing of the Republican party.
There are just different types of brains. I know I learned differently when I was young. I don't know if no one tried to explain it to me correctly but I remember being totally bamboozled by math abstractions like variables and functions. like y=f(x) would cause an aneurysm. It turned out that my brain does perfectly fine dealing with these concepts as I am perfectly fine writing functional programs. Where my brain still has problems is reading long ass formulas with single letter variables. It must be some kind of defect. The exact same formula with well named variables is perfectly understood by my brain. Anyway, I digress. When my daughter was growing up she had a variety of math teachers and variety of ways of being taught math. When she had lousy teachers she did poorly. When she had good teachers she did really well. Even though she always though she sucked at math she was actually in honors math through out high school. She was by no means a math genious, those kids are obvious when you see them but she got good grades and did really well in the sat's and got into a fantastic university. She still thinks she sucks at math. .
They can't do a goddamn thing unless they are surrounded by a crowd of orbitters telling them how pretty and smart they are every 10 seconds.
Fucking pathetic.
I thertanly think we should take it theriously.
Math requires logic and abstract thinking, both of which are slowly developing in children under 10 years of age.
That's why simple counting and rote memorization of addition and multiplication are the normal way of teaching math for the first few years of school.
Some faults just having kids go through the K - 9 grades
- Not using grid paper for multiplication and long division to ensure numbers are in the right columns
- Consumable textbooks / workbooks with much too little space to work the problem out
- Consumable textbooks / workbooks with 50% or more of the page space spent on pictures of animals, kids, balloons, etc not having anything to do with the problems
- Teachers combining multiple steps into a single step
- Teachers giving a shortcut way to compute the answer before the kids even understand and are proficient with the long way
- Teachers not insisting that kids write down what the already know before starting the problem
- Teachers not writing problems down using words instead of symbols -> (price paid) = (original cost) + (original cost) * (tax rate)
- Teachers not reinforcing how to rearrange terms in an X + Y + Z type of equation
The long way works and is proven via hundreds of years of trials to work.
The new math shortcuts have merit but only after high mastery of the long way.
Perhaps, but that's more of a semantic argument, as liberal today means something quite different from what it meant during the Gilded Age. The modern parallel is libertarian.
Allow me to summarize TFA and all the insightful comments above:
Parents are idiots.
Girls are idiots.
Boys are idiots.
Society is idiots.
"Educators" are idiots.
Ah, I see you are one of _those_. Please stay in your filter-bubble.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Girls? Math? Anxiety?
What about the boys? Are boys better at math than girls? This used to be common knowledge, but then we decided that girls needed to be interested in math so now everything is taught so that girls can get good grades. But look! They don't like math after all! They get ANXIETY!
Yes, boys are better than girls at math, and we need to recognize this.
I'm pretty sure mine is due to having discalulia, I do okay if I can attack the math problem in unconventional ways but it only gets me so far, I had to stop at Trig.
Makes good points. I'd add more but that gets some ideas people need to hear out. I have a whole family of educators.
There is a long term agenda to ruin public education and I have some contacts within the GOP and that is the unadvertised plan. It's basically another religion, the free market somehow magically is best for everything and without any data or proof they keep wanting it everywhere. Based upon that, any failures are the result of "lack of faith." A long term conversion is needed and the plan is to provide gradual things like competing schools instead of competent schools; promoting business mentality of high payed management (renaming principals to CEO) and constant growth... students as products, parents as customers etc. Letting it get expensive and ineffective so it's not so popular when they kill it. It's also never perfect so we have to revamp working programs drastically and never copy working ideas from other counties (because it might actually work.) The response to my questions about the damage this causes-- is that America is #1 and we can afford to screw over a few generations because in the end it'll go private and we'll have such a utopia it'll be worth the affordable investment.