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Math--that four-letter word!

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Math anxiety is extremely prevalent in the general population, but tends to have gender and age as key aspects to occurrence. A factor in this may be that many elementary teachers tend to be math phobic. This paper looks at two returning adult college students who participated in a Math Anxiety Workshop as well as follow-up mathematics tutoring and their battles with math anxiety.

Introduction

As an instructor of preservice teachers, I am always faced with instances of math anxiety in my students. I teach classes in mathematics methods of instruction to both prospective secondary and elementary teachers. Interestingly, even the students who will be secondary teachers have phobias that need to be addressed, these tending most often to be in the areas of problem solving, probability, or geometry. However, it is with elementary education majors that I run into the most severe cases of math anxiety. It seems to me, after many years of working with these students, that about two-thirds of them come in with feelings of inadequacy about their math ability, fears of having to teach math, and tendencies toward avoidance of math. My present elementary education major students have been required to pass three university math courses; one college algebra and two focused on elementary mathematics, and still have these reservations. Given the amount of information that can be found on the internet regarding math anxiety (a Google search turned up 1,510,000 listings on this topic), I know this is common across the nation.

Specifically, two recent articles in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) journal Teaching Children Mathematics (Wolodko, Willson, and Johnson, 2003; Guillaume and Kirtman, 2005) share studies of preservice elementary teachers' backgrounds in mathematics and how to deal with negative attitudes, a further indication that this problem is wide spread. Additionally, it appears that starting in adolescence, math anxiety is far more common in females than in males (Hyde, Fennema, and Lamon, 1990). Since the vast majority of elementary teachers are female, this highlights how common math anxiety is and how easy it may be to pass on the same problems to generations of students. However, it is not just teachers who are burdened with this phobia. In fact many people may choose not to pursue a career as a teacher because of their fear of taking and teaching mathematics courses. Walker and Karp (2005) indicate that math phobia is so widespread in the United States that it "profoundly affects the country's policies, teaching practices, and ultimately students' performance" (p.39).

Having math anxiety may not, of course, mean a person cannot understand or do certain mathematical tasks, but it can inhibit the ability to learn or successfully demonstrate that learning. While a distinction must be made between math anxiety and test anxiety, which means...

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