Researchers Probe Causes of Math Anxiety

It’s more than just disliking math, according to scholars

Math problems make more than a few students—and even teachers—sweat, but new brain research is providing insights into the earliest causes of the anxiety so often associated with mathematics.

Experts argue that “math anxiety” can bring about widespread, intergenerational discomfort with the subject, which could lead to anything from fewer students pursuing math and science careers to less public interest in financial markets.

“People are very happy to say they don’t like math,” said Sian L. Beilock, a University of Chicago psychology professor and the author of Choke, a 2010 book on brain responses to performance pressure. “No one walks around bragging that they can’t read, but it’s perfectly socially acceptable to say you don’t like math.”

Mathematics anxiety is more than just disliking math, however; someone with math anxiety feels negative emotions when engaging in an activity that requires numerical or math skills. In one forthcoming study by Ms. Beilock, simply suggesting to college students that they would be asked to take a math test triggered a stress response in the hypothalamus of students with high math anxiety.

Ms. Beilock and other experts at a Learning and the Brain conference held here May 5-7 are searching for the earliest problems in a child’s math career that can grow into lifelong fears and difficulties. The conference, put on by the Needham, Mass.-based Public Information Resources, Inc., brought together several hundred educators and administrators with researchers in educational neuroscience and cognitive science.

Stress in the Brain

Anxiety has become a hot topic in education research, as educators and policymakers become increasingly focused on test performance and more-intensive curricula, and neuroscience has begun to provide a window into how the brain responds to anxiety.

Anxieties and Stereotypes

Researchers have found that the more anxious their female teachers were about math, the more likely girls—but not boys— were to endorse gender-related stereotypes about math ability. In turn, the girls who echoed those stereotypical beliefs were performing less well than other students in math by year’s end.

SOURCE: University of Chicago

Anxiety can literally cut off the working memory needed to learn and solve problems, according to Dr. Judy Willis, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based neurologist, former middle school teacher, and author of the 2010 book Learning to Love Math.

When first taking in a problem, a student processes information through the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, which then prioritizes information going to the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for the brain’s working memory and critical thinking. During stress, there is more activity in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex; even as minor a stressor as seeing a frowning face before answering a question can decrease a student’s ability to remember and respond accurately.

“When engaged in mathematical problem-solving, highly math-anxious individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and ruminations,” said Daniel Ansari, the principal investigator for the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. “This takes up some of their processing and working memory. It’s very much as though individuals with math anxiety use up the brainpower they need for the problem” on worrying.

Moreover, a series of experiments at the Mangels Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Attention at Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests this stress reaction may hit hardest the students who might otherwise be the most enthusiastic about math.

Jennifer A. Mangels, the lab’s director, said she tested college students on math in either neutral situations or in ways designed to invoke anxiety, such as mentioning gender stereotypes about mathability to girls being tested, or telling students that their scores would be used to compare their math ability with others’.

Ms. Mangels found, in keeping with other research, that students tested in stressful situations had lower math performance. She also found that stress hit otherwise promising students the hardest.

In nonstressful tests, the students who most identified with math, defined as those who sought out more opportunities to learn within the math program, had the highest performance. While under stress, those same students performed worse than those who didn’t identify with the subject.

“We’re reducing the diagnostic ability of these tests by having students take them in a stressful situation,” Ms. Beilock agreed.

Dyscalculia and Bias

Two problems in a child’s earliest school experiences—one biological, the other social—can build into big math fears later on, experts say.

In a series of studies, Mr. Ansari and his colleagues at the Numerical Cognition Laboratory have found that adults with high math anxiety are more likely to have lower-than-typical ability to quickly recognize differences in numerical magnitude, or the total number of items in a set, which is considered a form of dyscalculia.

As part of normal development, children become increasingly adept at identifying which of two numbers of items is bigger, but Mr. Ansari found those with high math anxiety were slower and less accurate at that task, and brain scans showed activity different from that of people with low math stress doing the same tasks.

Because understanding numerical magnitude is a foundation for other calculations, Mr. Ansari suggests that small, early deficiencies in that area can lead to difficulties, frustration, and negative reactions to math problems over time.

Moreover, math anxiety can become a generational problem, with adults uncomfortable with math passing negative feelings on to their children or students.

Ms. Beilock found female 1st and 2nd grade teachers with high anxiety about math affected both their students’ math performance and their beliefs about math ability. In a study of a dozen 1st grade and five 2nd grade teachers and their students, researchers found no difference in the performance of boys and girls in math at the beginning of the year. By the end of the school year, however, girls taught by a teacher with high math anxiety started to score lower than boys in math.

Moreover, those girls were more likely to draw pictures supporting a gender bias—“Boys are good at math; girls are good at reading”—and the stronger the bias, the worse the girls performed.

That study, and similar ones, highlight a need for more training for parents and teachers on how to conquer their own math fears and avoid passing them to children, Ms. Beilock and Mr. Ansari said.

“Teacher math anxiety is really an epidemic,” Mr. Ansari said. “I think a lot of people go into elementary teaching because they don’t want to teach high school math or science.”

Eugene A. Geist, an associate professor at Ohio University in Athens and the author of the 2001 book, Children Are Born Mathematicians, works with math teachers to create “anxiety-free classrooms” for students. He advises teachers to have students focus on learning mathematics processes, rather than relying on the answer keys in a textbook, which can undermine both their own and the teacher’s confidence in their math skills.

“If I give the answer, you immediately forget about the question. If I don’t give you the answer, you will still have questions and you will be thinking about the problem long after,” he said.

By contrast, constantly referring to an answer key can undermine both students’ and teachers’ confidence in their own math skills, and encourage students to focus on being right over learning.

Likewise, Dr. Willis, the California neurologist, said that teachers can help students reduce their fear of participating during math discussions by asking all students to answer every question, using scratch paper or electronic clickers to “bet” on answers, and then talking about the problem as a group.

“It helps with wait time [between question and answer], increases participation, and decreases mistake fear,” Dr. Willis said. The key to helping students learn not to fear math, she said, is to “get students to expose faulty foundational knowledge, which they can only do if they make mistakes and participate.”

Just a note to say happy Memorial Day to all those who gave of their time, talent and treasure to our country. It is an honor to live side by side and next door, to have you in our families and as friends, to know how much you gave and how much has been asked of you. We love you.

We all love to stand on our own self made stages and pontificate – especially to children. “You will because I say so!” That works with little kids up to the age of about four. At four a child reaches a little age of reason, and can actually differentiate between a parent who is full of words and not a lot of actions, and a parent who means business because they have the actions to back them up. At this point, the child loses a certain respect for the adult in charge who is merely a “pontificater” yelling directions from an armchair.

Want to know why a child begins to forge out on his own to accomplish his life? Because as the child sees it, he’s never going to get what he needs from the armchair parent. It’s a wide and common point of view. “Mom and dad are too busy with their own life and their own recreation, so I’m going to take charge and do what I want.”

Parents think it’s natural for their words to be sacrosanct. Words are only sacrosanct if a parent can back it up. “Clean your room,” yells the angry parent. The child looks at the parent in the armchair watching TV. The house is a mess, the kitchen piled with dishes, the laundry cascading over the side of the sofa. What is one clean room going to do for this chaos? muses the astute child.

“All you eat is junk,” screams the parent to the child who is eating the last of the cookies and ice cream.” Well, if you didn’t buy it, the child couldn’t eat it. And why did you buy it if not to eat?

“You’re getting fat,” denounces the parent to the child, and the child wonders what the last three nights of restaurant food was all about if mom or dad was really interested in the child’s weight. The child also eyeballs the parent who is cascading out of a larger size.

It begins in very early childhood when parents make mistake after mistake with their child – right in front of the child – as if the child is brainless and won’t see or know what is happening or why. In our life as models we have to review the picture we are creating for the learning child.

Look at religious models. Pomp and circumstance railing from the pulpit about the abuse of riches and the need to give to the poor; then they get back into their Cadillac and Lincoln or Mercedes and drive back to the five bedroom homes in the best part of town. It sure doesn’t work for me.

When Mother Theresa brought people to her point of view, she moved quietly into a neighborhood and did good deeds quietly. She and her sisters went about like invisible soldiers making things right, feeding, nurturing, giving selflessly to the poor.

Like Mother Theresa, our job as parents should be just as quiet, just as soldier-like, and just as selfless.

When you tell a child to listen, do you really have something to say that is going to build him up, to make his life better? Or is what you have to say simply critical and negative. Do you scold without teaching? Do you nag without a plan? Do you demand without an arsenal of successful deeds in your own court?

Looking back on our own arsenal of deeds, what successes can we boast of that would be models that our children can use as stepping stones to success in their own lives? Was I faithful to the promises I made and to whom? Was I careful in matters that unified my family and made it stronger? What were my life goals, and how did my children see me working to make those goals come to life for the sake of my family?

Rearing children is letting the child – when the child is ready. It means pulling back on the care taking at the right time and letting the child begin to enter the world a little at a time until he has the ability to care for himself. He will rise and fall in his trials, and that’s where good parenting comes in. If a parent gives a child a task, the parent can only expect that the child will succeed a little at a time…and this becomes a teachable moment.

And letting a child fall on their face is fine if the subject is minor like the failure of a new recipe or buying the wrong size dress. These are easily fixable and easily forgotten. But letting children be publicly rude, fail repeatedly in school, hang out with questionable friends is not teaching…it’s letting the whole child go. It brings nothing but heartache for the child.

When parents miss the big steps with young children, they will also miss the big steps with the adolescent child. A child wants to drop out of school, drive the family car without a track record of responsible behavior, date a steady boy or girl friend who has questionable values and the parent just caves.

Just caving in is a learned experience that comes with allowing very young children to misbehave and laughing it off as “independence.” Then it’s on to letting young children do what they want. By the time a child is sixteen, the child is ready to fall so hard on his or her face that pick up takes years instead of minutes to recover from; that’s neglect.

Rearing and teaching children is no easy or simple task. Ask anyone who has done it for more than six weeks. But when the years are counted, it always comes out as the best work any person will do who has children. It is the most important job anyone will do in their life time. And like Mother Theresa’s quiet soldiers, it takes a constant falling and rising from the parent as well as the child to succeed. It begins with a positivism that says I can do this. And it continues with a do rather than say mentality.

With Memorial Day weekend quickly approaching and summer right around the corner, road trips and travelling will put more of a dent in the wallet as gas prices are at the highest average ever for this time of year. With some planning and preparing, it’s possible to maximize your fuel mileage so that you can have cost effective road trips in the coming months.

Max Bohbot, President of penny auction site Beezid.com, has put together tips on how to get the most out of what you’re paying for at the pump:

• Drive consistently and carefully: Avoid braking hard or accelerating unnecessarily quickly, you waste gas each time you accelerate just to brake a few seconds later.
• Do Your Research: Calculate how much a trip will cost in gas (you can use AAA’s gas calculator) and then compare it to bus, train or air fares.
• Cash not credit: Pay for gas with cash instead of charging it to a card, you’ll save a few cents per gallon. Sometimes you can buy gas cards at a discount on sites like Beezid.com.
• Fill ‘em up: Check that your tires are inflated according to the manufacturer’s recommended pressure. By maintaining well-inflated tires, you ensure your car is getting better mileage than on under-inflated tires.
• Invest in a GPS: Using a GPS cuts down on the chances of getting lost while driving to your destination which can waste time and gas. You can check out Beezid.com for deals on the latest GPS models.
• The one minute rule: If you’re going to idle your car for more than a minute, it’s worth turning off the engine. If it’s going to be under a minute, just leave the car running.
• The more, the cheaper: Try and carpool to destinations and split the costs of transportation costs.
• Quality goes a long way: Make sure to have your car or motorcycle inspected before you take a road trip, it’ll save you money to fix anything that might need repairs before your trip instead of potentially breaking down on the road which can become a costly inconvenience.

A finish up week with review for the kids and lots of bees and prizes. Cleaning, emptying, and getting ready for summer.

On Friday, we will have our awards presentation at 3:00 P.M. sharp.

Parents are asked to bring something to share. There is a sign up sheet at the front of the school on the door. The school will provide the hot dogs and buns and drinks.

It’s been a great year, and the children are now ready for summer. We hope parents like our go go go summer as much as you seem to have liked the school year. We NEVER stop at the Garden School. We do switch gears, but we absolutely NEVER stop.

Please take note of the new horses next door. We have a new foal traveling with her mama. It’s so sweet to see mama exercising her young one.

You know there is nothing quite like the taste of a superb muffin. It’s a filler and a delight at any meal. Making a good muffin is not hard, and it takes relatively little time. Muffin batter lasts a week in the refrigerator, so it’s a good investment in time.

Think about muffins when you are making dinner because you can put in a dozen muffins and have them for dinner and then for breakfast the next day.

Making a muffin requires what most people have in their kitchens without shopping:

Flour – now is the time to use that whole wheat flour! But any flour will do. For a family of four – making twelve muffins, you’ll need two cups of either white or whole wheat.

You’ll need a half a cup of sugar. Any kind will do. Brown sugar will make the muffins denser, and white sugar will make the muffins lighter. Half and half…well you can figure it out.

You’ll need a teaspoon of salt.

You’ll need baking powder – a heaping teaspoon. Be generous with your baking powder; it can mean the difference between muffins that are “gluey” and muffins that are light and airy.

You will need an egg.

You will need half a cup of butter, oil, margarine, crisco – this helps bind and gives the muffin flavor.

You will need something wet -milk, juice, applesauce even water. You will need about a cup.

That’s it. Now isn’t that easy? You mix all your ingredients and bake at 350 degrees in a greased cup cake tin for about twenty minutes.

Now, if you want to be creative, you can add other things to your muffins while you are mixing them.

Some of the things you might consider are raisins, nuts, bananas, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, maple flavoring, vanilla, chocolate, butterscotch, apples, orange rind, almond flavoring, lemon rind, lemon juice, jam, oats, peanuts, onion, bacon, cheese bits…and just about anything you can think of.

A muffin, after all is just a little dinner cake, so the sky is the limit.

A muffin made with great goods from home might just be the best thing you’ve eaten all week.

Here’s a new ezine that you can get on line by clicking HERE. This ezine is all about vacations, staycations and more.

It’s worth a look !

Just read a facebook discussion about how expensive childcare is and it kind of made me cringe. It made me uncomfortable because I know it’s expensive, and I know it cuts into other family needs and wants on the financial front. But at the same time, I know childcare outside the home is a necessary part of the budget and it can’t be free.

The facebook posting also made me uncomfortable because of how hard our staff at the Garden School works to present a truly great place for children to play and to learn and to grow. And I suppose I should be pragmatic and realize that no matter what we do for our families, there will always be those parents whose first thought is pocketbook.

I’ve been in the early childhood business for nearly thirty years, and in that time, I’ve seen a lot of really poor childcare out side the home, and I’ve seen a lot of parents struggle to pay for it, and that is the one promise I made to myself when I started. That no matter what the statis quo is, I will always do my best for the children in my care.

I’ve seen just about every scenario there is. For ten years, I was a monitor for fifty family day cares across the southern part of the State of Indiana. In that time, I reviewed a lot of homes that provided childcare, and for the most part, these were excellent places and the providers did their best to provide a caring place for children. I always recommend a family home first to people who ask because of the nurturing I saw in those homes.

I’ve also visited a lot of childcares, daycares and preschools and I’ve seen a lot of places come and go, and most of these places have been poor at best. Poor because the hired help are just that – hired help at a little more than minimum wage. I was gleefully told at the door of one establishment that they employed thirty-five floaters. I once walked into a reputable day care to tour, and the babies were locked into a room without an adult, and the key could not be found. I have had menus that looked like something from concentration camp. I’ve seen pureed puree and white on white and goop on goop. In one place, the toys were marked, “Closed.”

Thirty years ago when I started, childcare, even in family homes, was much worse than it is today. It was a disgrace with awful basement care, few tattered and sometimes dangerous toys, poor lunches – like a piece of cheese flung at a child at lunch time, long naps that encompassed most of the day, and TV. I’ve heard providers say, “I’m better at caring for the children than their parents.” This is a terrible statement and rarely true.

My theory is that children are always better off at home then with a provider – any provider. Our job is to offer children, who are out of their homes for the day, the very best of everything every single day. There is no such thing as skimping on a child’s day.

When I started a family day care in my home, I decided right from the beginning that my place would be different from the disgraceful places I had witnessed out there in daycare land. It didn’t take long to establish a busy place. In three years, I had sixty-seven children on my roster and parents came to trust me as someone who was good for their children. I charged a $1.00 an hour.

Right along with hanging out a shingle, I started a preschool in my home and was blackballed by the other providers. I made all my snacks from scratch from the beginning. I made super meals and provided swimming and some field trips – and no naps. I hate naps.

Today, I am still trying to offer the best program for the least amount of money possible. I struggle with summer fees for half the year. I usually have a couple of children on scholarship; I give the poor big breaks, and I always listen to those who need financial help.

It costs $125.00 per week for a child to come to the Garden School. That’s $25.00 per day. If you subtract three meals at $2.00, $5.00, and $2.00, that must be eaten out, that leaves a balance of $16.00 per day for child care. In a ten hour day, that’s $1.60 an hour. If you suggested to a babysitter that price, you’d never get one.

Yet in all fairness, it’s expensive when you add up those weeks. It’s a mortgage payment, two car payments, all your medical expenses for a year. It’s the food cost, the utility cost, the vacation you can’t take…all because of childcare.

That’s why, when buying childcare, parents must be offered the very best. There have to be the extras: really great meals that help children discover their palate, foods, tastes and nutrition. A real education from a staff that is intelligent and knows how to read, how to create an art project, how to speak properly, how to incorporate a plan in the day that broadens not only the children’s day but the other staff members. The staff needs to be able to bond with children, to understand their needs and wants in the absence of parents. There must be outings so trust is built between child and adult. And there should be a multitude of expensive toys that allow children to explore, and this is the tip of the iceberg.

But all of these points take work. I know, I spend the time and do that work – about sixty-five hours a week. It’s a dilemma that is only solved by a moral code and a love for children.

This wood art is fascinating. It is so creative and yet so silly. I love the cars at the end. Enjoy your Wednesday and this wonderful art.