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Math Anxiety Causes and Cures
- 1. MATH ANXIETY CAUSES AND CURES
Editor's Notes
- FROM “THE PSYCH FILES” MICHAEL BRITT INTERVIEW WITH Dr. Eugene Geist, Associate Professor at Ohio University – Athens, Ohio and specialist in early childhood education
- The old ways do not teach number sense!
- Another common issue in early students is the concept of being compared to your peers on math ability. Far from motivating students, this can have the opposite effect, causing the students, embarrassment, withdrawal, and again Math Anxiety.
- Yet another issue causing Math Anxiety in students, is being called up to the front of the room in front of their peers to answer a question on the board at random. Yes, it is good for students to come to the board and show their work, but not to call them out at random, when they may not no the answer or where to start. This can be very stressful for a student, to stand at the board and literally freeze while their classmates snicker behind them, no wonder kids that have endured this have an Anxiety issue when it come to math.
- Why do kids have anxiety in math? Because they learn it from an early age. Nobody likes being told they are wrong, and for kids this is even more so. For those kids that are unlucky enough to have had a poor math teacher, who instead of helping students understand math, they simply tell them “Your Wrong”, this increases their anxiety at such an early age. It just sets them up for having Math Anxiety!
- So those are some of the causes of Math Anxiety in students, What then is the Cure!! For starters, we as teachers need to not make students just memorize the rules, we need to teach them instead how to make sense of the Numbers. After students have learned Number Sense, then it is time to teach the rules, but never before!! When rules are taught to early, the students lose site of what is really happening with the numbers and instead they just try to apply the rule to get the problem down.
- So the question is, How do we teach our students Number Sense. A great quote from Benjamin Franklin, gives us that answer. “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
- To involve kids in making sense of numbers we need to early with their very first math experiences in school. The common core standards for math are very good and laid out in a way to teach students number sense. As teachers we need to take the standards and teach them in an interactive way with our students. Manipulatives, let the kids figure out their own ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers. Group work, kids show their process, not the answer.
- Another important thing to remember is to make math meaningful for students we need to relate math to everyday applications
- So Multiplication they begin by learting arrays, but lets make it meaningful in a fun way.
- Guide our students. “That doesn’t seem right to me” can be used for wrong or right answers and gets students to think through the process Give kids the power to ask questions and ask to justify teachers answers.
- When students learn “Number Sense” the become confident students in math and that is how we can do away with Math Anxiety in our students.