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[quote=Anonymous]Math anxiety: who has it, why it develops, and how to guard against it
Erin A. Maloney and Sian L. Beilock

[quote]Alleviating math anxiety

Understanding the antecedents of math anxiety provides clues about how to prevent its occurrence. For instance, [b]bolstering basic numerical and spatial processing skills may help to reduce the likelihood of developing math anxiety.[/b] If deficiencies in basic mathematical competencies predispose students to becoming math anxious, then early identification of at-risk students (coupled with targeted exercises designed to boost their basic mathematical com- petencies and regulate their potential anxieties) may help to prevent children from developing math anxiety in the first place.

Knowledge about the onset of math anxiety also sheds light on how to weaken the link between math anxiety and poor math performance in those who are already math anxious. If exposure to negative math attitudes increases the likelihood of developing math anxiety, which in turn adversely impacts math learning and performance, then [b]regulation of the negativity associated with math situations may increase math success[/b], even for those individuals who are chronically math anxious. Support for this idea comes from work showing that when simply anticipating an upcoming math task, math anxious individuals who show activation in a frontoparietal network known to be involved in the control of negative emotions perform nearly as well as their non-anxious counterparts on a difficult math test [11]. These neural findings suggest that [b]strategies that emphasize the regulation and control of negative emotions[/b] – even before a math task begins – may enhance the math performance of highly math anxious individuals.

One means by which people can regulate their negative emotions is expressive writing in which people are asked to write freely about their emotions for 10–15 min with respect to a specific situation (e.g. an upcoming math exam). [b]Writing is thought to alleviate the burden that negative thoughts place on working memory[/b] by affording people an opportunity to re-evaluate the stressful experience in a manner that reduces the necessity to worry altogether. Demonstrating the benefits of expressive writing, Ramirez and Beilock showed that having highly test anxious high school students write about their worries prior to an upcoming final exam boosted their scores from B– to B+ (even after taking into account grades across the school year) [12]. Similar effects have been found specifically for math anxiety. Writing about math-related worries boosts the math test scores of math anxious students [13].

Negative thoughts and worries can also be curtailed by reappraisal or re-framing techniques. [b]Simply telling students that physiological responses often associated with anxious reactions (e.g. sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat) are beneficial for thinking and reasoning can improve test performance in stressful situations[/b] [14]. Having students think positively about a testing situation can also help them to reinterpret their arousal as advantageous rather than debilitating. For example, when students view a math test as a challenge rather than a threat, the stronger their physiological response to the testing situation (measured here in terms of salivary cortisol), the better, not worse, is their performance [15].

Summing up

Education, psychology, and neuroscience researchers have begun to uncover the antecedents of math anxiety. Not only is math anxiety present at the beginning of formal schooling, which is much younger than was previously assumed, but its development is also probably tied to both social factors (e.g. [b]a teacher’s anxiety about her own math ability[/b]) and a [b]student’s own basic numerical and spatial competencies[/b] – where deficiencies may predispose students to pick up on negative environmental cues about math. Perhaps most striking, [b]many of the techniques employed to reduce or eliminate the link between math anxiety and poor math performance involve addressing the anxiety rather than training math itself.[/b] When anxiety is regulated or reframed, students often see a marked increase in their math performance. These findings underscore the important role that affective factors play in situations that require mathematical reasoning.

Unfortunately, it is still quite rare that numerical cognition research takes into account issues of math anxiety when studying numerical and mathematical processing. By ignoring the powerful role that anxiety plays in mathematical situations, we are overlooking an important piece of the equation in terms of understanding how people learn and perform mathematics.[/quote][/quote]

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