Facing Math Anxiety in the Classroom

Math anxiety has been an issue facing teachers in math education for years, it is even recognized in official publications such as the American Psychological Association who states that “Math anxiety is a worry or fear that occurs when people try to solve math problems, take tests, or even think about numbers” (Weir, 2023).  The studies done by this organization have shown that starting in elementary school roughly ¼ or ⅕ of students may begin to experience some form of math anxiety. 

I myself have seen students in many of my placements experience math anxiety to different extents and to different outcomes. One of the more extreme effects of math anxiety I witnessed in teaching math was the full shut down of some students when being presented with a math problem that they thought was too difficult for themselves. This is also true even with adults that I have seen outside of the classroom, who simply say that “they don’t have a math brain” or “they were never that good at math” as an excuse to not have to face a real life math problem that might be too difficult for them. 

The task that teachers are now faced with in the math classroom is not only to teach the content, but to teach social and emotional skills to help students manage the stress that they feel when presented with a math problem, and find ways to minimize this anxiety so that they can in turn have a mindset that is ready for learning. 

So the solution to fighting math anxiety in the classroom needs to be two fold, on one side we need to help put our students at ease in the classroom when being introduced to new math concepts or topics they struggle with, and to the other side we must prepare our students for a life outside the classroom where they will be faced with math in different aspects of everyday life. 

While there are different studies and conclusions on what teachers can do to help, here are a few that I believe we need to start introducing into our classes to help our students with math anxiety. 

-Validating our students' emotions / Promote mental health awareness. Now more than ever mental health has taken a place at the forefront of education and we need to recognize that our students could be facing math anxiety and other mental health issues without us even knowing. This is why it is important to check-in with students, build relationships and provide them the space to express any stress or concern.  

-Normalizing struggle & mistakes while showing students that they are a means to learn and improve. Everybody makes mistakes! Whether this is shown in class by a teacher intentionally or unintentionally making a mistake, or building questions around the idea of learning from mistakes, allowing students to know that failure isn't the final destination is crucial to reducing the anxiety some students may face. 

-Differentiate our instruction to support different types of learners by having multiple representations of concepts when possible. I know people who have struggled with math who do have a better time with the concepts that they are able to see or manipulate. 

While these ideas are only some of many that teachers are starting to do in classes, as teachers we do need to keep ourselves up to date on the current best practices and strategies in place to help our students with math anxiety to hopefully lead them to a successful educational journey in mathematics. 

https://www.apa.org/topics/anxiety/helping-kids-manage-math-anxiety 

Making Math Mobile: Running & Rates

B2. Operations

B2.1 use the properties and order of operations, and the relationships between operations, to solve problems involving whole numbers, decimal numbers, fractions, ratios, rates, and percents, including those requiring multiple steps or multiple operations

When I was in my last placement in the faculty of education I taught students the differences between ratios and rates and the different kinds of real life scenarios in which we would use these (e.g. recipes, speeds, etc.) 

One thing to know about this class, while math may not have been the favourite subject of most students, they loved moving around and they loved their gym time, so I thought to myself “What better opportunity to get them moving and learning at the same time!” 

So, to incorporate my student’s competitive nature into their math education, I decided to plan a race! Here’s what the students had to do:

-Make a group of 3 or 4 

-Students had to answer two prediction questions before they could go down to the gym and start their races. The questions asked them to predict who would be the fastest in their group and why, and to predict the rates of speed everyone would run. 

-Once they were in the gym, they would run either 10 or 20 meters with one groupmate responsible for stopping the timer, and another for documenting the results, each student would get 3-5 attempts depending on what they were comfortable with doing. 

-They also were able to run for 10 seconds and measure how far they ran in that time using the 10m and 20m marks as a baseline.

(Doing this gave students examples of rates where the first term was an easy number to do calculations with, and one where the second term was an easy number to do calculations with)

-Afterwards, students had rates with how many seconds it took them to run 10 or 20 meters and rates of how far they could run in 10 seconds. Students had to take their best attempt and convert the rate to m/s (number of meters per second to be precise)

- Students then had to make a ratio of their m/s rates amongst their group. 

-Students then look back at their predictions and see if they were correct and make any notes of the differences and similarities. 

As one final piece to this task, I reviewed all the students' time and announced to the class the top three runners in the group with the fastest speeds. 

When I was running this activity, I noticed how some of my students who were not the most engaged in class were actively participating in this activity because the math became enjoyable to them when paired with an activity. 

While I certainly am always looking for areas to improve in, and can admit that this activity may not have been perfect, I do think it was a fun break from the classroom that many of my students in that class needed.