The employment future looks bright for people with strong math skills. But among the nation’s K-12 students, that represents a small and dwindling demographic.
Nearly 40 percent of 8th graders, and almost a quarter of 4th graders, demonstrated below basic proficiency on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, released in January. Meanwhile, employment in math occupations is slated to grow much faster than the average for all occupations, at least through 2033, experts project. Even some jobs that don’t require a college degree, like carpentry and mechanics, require basic algebra skills.
What’s to blame for students’ poor math proficiency? One major contributor to the problem might be math anxiety, defined by the late researcher and academician Sheila Tobias as “a learned emotional response” to math-related activities—such as participating in a math class, working through a math problem, or taking a math test.
Here’s a closer look at math anxiety: what fuels it, who’s likely to suffer from it, and how teachers can work to stave it off.
What does math anxiety feel like, and how common is it?
People with math anxiety can feel “suddenly blank and unable to think” when they look at a math problem, wrote Education Week reporter Sarah Sparks in a 2020 reported essay on the topic. They might experience sweating palms, a racing heartbeat, or other physical symptoms of anxiety.
Experts estimate that math anxiety affects 20 percent to 30 percent of students, and most teachers recognize it as a legitimate problem. In a nationally representative 2020 survey, 67 percent of teachers told the EdWeek Research Center that math anxiety was a challenge for their students.
Notably, once math anxiety is ingrained in a student’s psyche, its symptoms tend to surface even before that student begins a challenging math problem or test. Further, math anxiety tends to precipitate a student’s downward spiral—encompassing reluctance to practice math, further erosion of confidence in one’s math ability, and stalled skill development. It’s no wonder, then, that it’s been linked to long-term poor academic outcomes in math.
No single explanation of why people experience math anxiety
There’s no single profile of someone who suffers from math anxiety, which can affect both low-performing and high-performing students, said Colleen Ganley, a professor at Florida State University’s psychology department who studies math anxiety in students. Sometimes math anxiety is actually a sign of general anxiety, she said.
Just as environmental influences and life experiences can play a role in the development of general anxiety, experts suggest that the same is true of math anxiety. After all, children aren’t born fearing math. Confronting increasingly challenging math content and exposure to others’ negative attitudes about math may fuel the problem, research shows.
And plenty of adults harbor negative feelings about math. Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults report severe math anxiety, and the 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey showed that 1 in 4 teachers feel anxious doing math. Further, research out of the University of Chicago found that adults’ attitudes about math—both teachers’ and parents’—can influence students’ math performance.
Some instructional strategies can affect math anxiety
While no two students respond identically to a teacher’s affect or method of instruction, some approaches may incite math anxiety in students more so than others.
Timed exercises—in which students are asked to solve a certain number of problems within a given time frame to assess their grasp on math facts and fluency—have long been cited as inducing math anxiety in students.
One recent study, published in the Journal of School Psychology, counters this theory. In the study, researchers gave a sample of 113 4th and 5th graders four different math tasks—some timed, others not—and surveyed the students about their levels of anxiety before and after the assigned tasks. The researchers found that timing the tasks made no statistically significant differences in students’ (self-reported) anxiety.
It’s worth noting that these findings relied on the self-reporting of elementary-age students. And they don’t seem to have swayed The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’s sentiment on timed tests, whose position statement on the subject reads: “Timed tests do not assess fluency and can negatively affect students, and thus should be avoided.”
Math researcher Ganley emphasized that not all students will react similarly to any given type of instruction.
“Some students may thrive in a fast-paced competitive atmosphere, while others find it anxiety-provoking,” she said.
Instructional approaches aside, what happens at home, even before a child reaches formal schooling, can play into how children feel about math.
“What kind of exposure do kids get at a really young age to numbers and numeracy to build that same kind of literacy [as reading readiness]?” asked Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of Advanced Education Research & Development Fund, a national nonprofit dedicated to advancing research and development in PreK-12 education.
Strategies for managing math anxiety
Just as math anxiety doesn’t have a single origin, there’s no one way to prevent or reduce it. But here, experts offer a number of suggestions for their math-anxious students.
Refrain from putting students “on the spot,” said Ganley. Insisting that a student attempt to solve a complicated math problem in front of the class when that student clearly feels unprepared to do so, for instance, could serve to ramp up anxiety—not get the desired response, or math solution.
Teachers should encourage students to master basic math facts.
“Not possessing fluency adds a lot of cognitive load to each step of a mathematical process,” said Michelle Tiu, co-executive director of EF+Math, a research & development program of AERDF that aims to improve math learning outcomes for students in grades 3–8. “If students’ cognitive load is not taken up with thinking about basic fluency facts, it frees them up to be able to focus on higher-order thinking and conceptual understanding.”
Aim for conceptual understanding as opposed to simply focusing on drills and timed tasks, said Tiu.
“In conceptual understanding, you’re really able to look at what we call ‘low-floor, high-ceiling’ tasks,” she said. “Low floor meaning there’s a lot of accessible points, no matter students’ backgrounds or ability levels. And high ceiling means that there’s a lot of different areas for the students to be able to take their approach.”
Present challenging math problems to students as a game or puzzle, rather than a task that will be graded, said Jalisha Jenifer, lead author of a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology on the study habits of math-anxious students.
And help students reframe their physical symptoms of anxiety in real time. That could involve having students consider their sweating palms or racing heartbeat on the day of a math test not as symptoms of anxiety, but as “signs of excitement or readiness,” said Christopher S. Rozek, an assistant professor in the department of education at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on helping students manage their emotions.
