A fear of mathematics does not add up to a flourishing future
Written by Dr Benadette Aineamani
It’s no secret that South African learners have historically underperformed in the subject of mathematics. As our country heads into a digital future powered by the fourth industrial revolution, the need for higher mathematics acumen in our matriculants and graduates grows exponentially. The jobs of the future are technical and will require our education system to put a lot more focus on raising the mathematics bar. For now, our learners need to overcome their fear and anxiety of this subject, but how?
You may not know it, but maths anxiety has been a dominant force in education history since time immemorial. It is a problem all over the world and has come to shape the very curriculums that seek to convey this arithmetic-based subject. In South Africa, this anxiety is increased by various challenges that have been highlighted by many researchers within the education system.
Even if our children get to school and into the mathematics classroom (or exam), they then need to overcome the inherent performance anxiety that comes with it. But it isn’t just felt in schools, maths anxiety is felt in classrooms, homes, and workplaces across the world and is widely acknowledged as a barrier to engagement and progress in maths, as well as other areas of education, employment, and life.
How do you tackle maths anxiety? It starts with understanding exactly where it comes from.
What causes maths anxiety?
Maths anxiety has many possible causes and contributing factors that have been researched over the years, and others are currently being researched. We all have curious brains that have an in-built, highly-tuned safety mechanism that protects us so we can avoid danger. And when faced with a perceived ‘danger’, we have a ‘fight or flight response’.
When it comes to maths anxiety, the same principle applies. If faced with a task that requires maths, many could perceive ‘danger’ to be:
- Social threats – such as humiliation, exclusion and being left behind or isolated
- Fear of failure – being asked to do something the learner experiences as too hard through insufficient scaffolding, context, meaning or narrative.
Research has shown so far that these are common contributing factors to maths anxiety across different ages and stages of life.
In schools around the world, many students report experiencing maths anxiety as a result of finding the work difficult, competing with peers, gender bias, teaching methods, and lack of extension and remediation. In a South African context, we can add a host of other challenges such as time-on-task, which has been further impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We can also look at multilingual aspects as a further hurdle on our road to mathematics acumen and confidence among learners.
Beyond the school environment, being asked to work out a share of a bill, help with homework or answer a quick-fire question involving maths in front of others can commonly invoke panic and anxiety for people of all ages.
How do we overcome maths anxiety?
We all have a role to play in our society, to address maths anxiety. Leaders in our schools, colleges, universities, and even at the workplace need to work with the relevant stakeholders such as teachers, students, parents, employees, and publishers, to address maths anxiety. Tools and approaches to help students and citizens overcome their anxiety should be provided. Also, students should be made aware of the support of those around them.
Building on 60 years of research into the area, there is still much more we can do to improve our approaches to maths anxiety in schools and colleges. So how can we do this? Here are a few ways:
- Support learners from as early as the Foundation Phase, to develop ‘maths talk’ by introducing mathematical concepts and language in a way that young children already understand, such as through discussing ‘sharing’ and ‘fairness’. This is considered an important starting point in helping to ‘normalise’ maths and help prevent future anxiety
- Building mathematical resilience by encouraging mathematical engagement in a way that reduces the negative effects that lead to maths anxiety. It can be defined as “maintaining self-efficacy in the face of personal or social threat to mathematical well-being”.
- Go beyond the textbook to provide tangible and relatable real-world examples that learners can relate to in their own lives to convey mathematical concepts.
- Content that is given to students should be carefully written in relation to the intended learning objective, to avoid any misconceptions or ambiguity.
- Teachers should be encouraged to allow more thinking time before asking for responses to questions.
- The feedback given to students after they attempt a maths task should not be negative or a ‘put-off’.
- In a classroom setting, the behaviour of students laughing at their classmates who struggle with maths tasks should be strongly discouraged by teachers through strategic approaches such as using students’ incorrect answers to discover underlying misconceptions instead of marking their answers as wrong and moving on to the next task.
- Every opportunity to raise awareness of the issue can make a difference – be it running a focused training programme with staff, student awareness workshops and support groups or putting the definition of maths anxiety on a board, to put everyone at ease with their feelings of anxiety.
Our societal fear of maths is one of those things that we have to acknowledge and work around in all sectors of our society – not just in schools.
This is a societal issue that requires teachers, lecturers, parents, politicians, businesses, charities, and media to get behind solving. If we want to build maths-confident communities and prime our youth to engage with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, then we need to make maths a critical part of our lives.
From the way we present mathematicians in popular culture, to opening the doors to industry and inspiring a culture of continued learning and enthusiasm for STEM, we need to discover, agree on, and commit to practical steps that we can ALL take to ensure that every South African can find power in mathematics instead of fear and anxiety. Now that’s a formula that adds up.
