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| title | Math Anxiety and Dyscalculia |
Lots of people are scared of science and math. They think it's something that only really brilliant people can do, and they don't think of themselves as brilliant, so how can they be expected to keep up?
Everyone experiences these fears, but for people with math anxiety or developmental dyscalculia (DD), those fears can get ramped up and out of control. Without the right interventions, students with math anxiety or DD can not only get left behind academically, but suffer real emotional and mental anguish. And because science classes, and especially physics, involve math, it's important to me that I know how to make my students feel comfortable and able to learn. I mean, that's my whole job.
All students learning any math will benefit from manipulatives, or objects used to represent mathematical concepts. These can be as simple as beans reprensenting numbers, to 3D-printed projections of extradimensional shapes. They are essentially math's answer to models in science: think of the ball-and-stick models of chemical compounds.
Manipulatives have been shown to provide long-term gains in mathematical ability; however, using them effectively requires extra effort from teachers, and may even require special training or meeting with a specialist.
For instance, students with DD tend to have difficulty subitizing, or breaking quantities down into groups. So, if a student presented with two groups of five beans, they would need to count each individual bean to say that there are ten there. It is not enough to present them with two groups of five beans, to give them manipulatives; how that lesson is run, and how the knowledge is assessed and reinforced, is the most important factor.
Fortunately, there are a great deal of resources to make manipulative use accessible and widespread. The companies that make the manipulatives have lesson plans to accompany them, and websites like Math for Love and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have further resources on theory and implementation. There are manipulatives that look like money; there are manipulatives designed specifically to teach place value, fractions, addition, and subtraction; there are virtual manipulatives, such as NumberBeads, in which students can drag, drop, slice, and meld strings of beads to develop their ability to subitize. Because of the wide variety of manipulatives, there is no one way to implement them, so it is important that teachers familiarize themselves with the specific manipulatives they plan to use and are conscientious as they plan their lessons with them.
So incorporating manipulatives into my classroom is actually a relatively easy task; much less easy to handle is the fear that goes along with math anxiety.
Students with DD can struggle not just academically, but also emotionally. They can develop math anxiety because general education math classes do not meet their needs, and so they consistently underperform. In his article on DD in Child Neuropsychology: Concepts, Theory, and Practice, Brian Butterworth included interviews with 9-year-olds with DD about their experiences in math class:
Child 5: It makes me feel left out, sometimes.
Child 2: Yeah.
Child 5: When I like---when I don’t know something, I wish that I was like a clever person and I blame it on myself---
Child 4: I could cry and wish I was at home with my mum and it would be---I won’t have to do any maths.
And while math anxiety very frequently co-occurs with DD, there are many students with no learning disabilities who still struggle with math anxiety. Every student deserves equal access to a math education that works for them, and addressing the needs of people with learning disabilities or anxiety is already an issue of equity: neurotypical students are not the only people whose needs must be met. But that issue goes even deeper when one realizes that a student's math anxiety may be borne out of stereotype threat, which is the sense of anxiety one experiences when they're worried about playing into a stereotype.
It is clear that, from purely a mental health standpoint, interventions to alleviate these students’ anxiety are absolutely necessary. But there is a further, more pedagogical motivation here, too: anxiety strongly affects academic performance and working memory, so addressing it will both help students take care of themselves and learn more effectively.
Fortunately, many interventions for other anxiety are shown to work well for students with math anxiety. Practices rooted in mindfulness, like focused breathing exercises, and other therapeutic practices, like expressive journaling, have been shown to both allay students’ fears about math and improve their performance on math assignments.
There are lots of structured breathing exercises that have been shown to alleviate anxiety, such as guided visualizations (like keeping an imaginary feather a loft with your breath) and four-corner or tactical breathing: breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds. I really like four-corner breathing because it's a quick and easy way to ground yourself, and it's especially easy to implement while you're in the middle of something stressful and time-sensitive, like a math test. Some of my favorite resources on mindfulness and breathing exercises are Stop, Breathe & Think, which has kid-friendly meditations and many resources for educators, and Coping Skills for Kids, developed by a children's counselor.
I'd love to use expressive journaling in my classroom, and that paper is a really interesting read. The authors told student volunteers that they were about to take a math test, and asked students to “write as openly as possible about your thoughts and feelings regarding the math problems you are about to perform.... really let yourself go and explore your emotions and thoughts.... Please try to be as open as possible as you write.” They then allowed students to freewrite for seven minutes before they completed the test.
Of the students with math anxiety, those who were highly expressive about their anxiety had higher performance gains than those who used less specific language, and all of those who journaled did better than those who did not. This suggests that emotional honesty is key to this process; so if I implement this, I'll emphasize that to my students, and make sure they know that no one will read their journals, so they can feel free to be as honest as possible.
I'm thrilled by this journaling intervention for few reasons. First, it's a good intervention for math anxiety; second, it's a good way to work some writing into my class; and third, it's a really good way to get my kids to be honest with themselves and their emotions, which is so healthy, and so hard for teenagers! It's an important life skill that builds resilience, and I want my students to be able to transition into college life and adulthood as smoothly as possible.