One of my colleagues shared with me that she struggled with math when she was young. Interestingly, her mother was sympathetic at the time and shared that she had trouble with math herself. Fast-forward a dozen years, and my colleague was responsible for managing six-figure budgets for a small company. She discovered that, once she got over the nervousness about this part of her job, she was both good at it and enjoyed it.
I have met countless students over the years with similar anxieties about math and science.
Sian Beilock, associate psychiatry professor at the University of Chicago and author of the book Choke, has done several studies on performance pressures. Her most recent research measures the brain's reaction when a person is faced with math problems to solve.
"We know that anxiety or fear of math can lead people to perform worse than what they know," said Beilock.
College students' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Beilock determined that students with high math anxiety who were able to access the frontal and parietal portions of the brain--those linked to cognitive control, focus, and regulating negative emotions, were able to perform nearly as well as student with low math anxiety.
Basically, students' performance had less to do with fear than how they dealt with the fear. Interestingly, the portions of the brain in charge of cognitive and emotional control don't fully develop until a person reaches the mid-20s, so the results are even more important for younger students--and perhaps this is why my colleague was able to enjoy and use math more effectively as an adult.
Many teachers know that techniques for addressing anxiety, such as test anxiety, can be taught. I know many who teach their students deep breathing, or to finger-trace a spiral to help them focus.
Beilock says, "Math interventions that address anxiety may be more helpful than those that remediate math skills alone."
In other words, if you know that your students know the material but freeze under pressure, teach them how to handle the stress.
Sian Beilock interview about her book Choke. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcr4ZD-Vrsg
