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."

Comments

Re:perhaps kids are like this in the u.s.

[apoc.famine]

It looks crazy because of four reasons:

1) You didn't grow up with it, and it's really unfamiliar to you.
2) More than likely, you've seen a bit of the middle, but not the fundamentals necessary to get there.
3) What you think is being taught is likely not what's being taught.
4) The teacher teaching it didn't grow up with it either, and may not be all that good at teaching it.

To the third point, where we learned one thing by rote learning, kids now are instead learning several methodological skills that accomplish the same thing, but which can later extend into higher order math. Rote learning doesn't provide that foundation. We look at them and say, "Why the hell are they making multiplication so fucking difficult?" In reality, they're not teaching multiplication, at least not the way we learned it. Entwined in what they're teaching are some linear algebra concepts and some matrix math.

Instead of doing rote memorization of times tables, they're teaching the process to multiply any numbers together. What's really confusing is that they're doing this at the point in school where we all just memorized the times tables up to maybe 12x12. If you don't understand that what they're teaching is fundamentally different than what you were taught, yeah, it looks crazy if you're expecting those kids to be memorizing what 8 * 6 is. That's not what they're doing.

"Why not just teach multiplication?" It's a valid question, but that presumes how we were taught multiplication is the best way. We really learned most of our math by brute forcing it all on rote memory. As that's our muscle memory, it seems to us that that's the easiest path forward. When we got to linear algebra and some of the higher order math, for a lot of us it was the same "new concepts, smash until understand" process that we learned in our earlier math classes. The idea with this new way of teaching math is to dispatch with all of that, and instead build in methods and processes from the beginning that can be leveraged in later math classes.

Fundamentally, it's pretty damn sound. Unfortunately, we're living in the first generation of a new way to do mathematics, and dealing with that sometimes rocky transition.

To the last point, I think that the next generation of math teachers will likely do a much better job teaching it, because they grew up with it. But it's a chicken and egg problem - kids can't learn a new way to do math if the teachers don't teach it, and the teachers can't teach it until they learn it. Unfortunately a whole lot of teachers haven't really learned it yet, in part because of the same cogitative dissonance we experience when looking at it. It's going to be a generation or two until math teachers are good at it, and unfortunately we're the ones that are suffering through it in the mean time.