A little stress can motivate, but teachers increasingly report their students’ fears over math interfere with their learning.
In a nationally representative survey conducted this spring, nearly all K-12 educators told the EdWeek Research Center that math anxiety is a problem for their students. More than 1 in 5 elementary educators and more than 1 in 3 middle and high school educators said their students’ math anxiety is severe—which could potentially be enough to interfere with learning, or sometimes even attempting to solve problems.
Plummeting math performance and rising rates of student mental health problems have created a perfect storm for math anxiety, but emerging research shows there are clear ways teachers can build students’ confidence in the subject.
This primer on math anxiety offers five research-aligned strategies teachers can use to support students who avoid practicing math and are uncomfortable with the subject.
How does math anxiety work?
Math anxiety includes both stress around testing and a broader fear and avoidance of math tasks in general. Highly math-anxious people develop more negative emotional and even pain responses in the brain.
Anxiety can develop among both high- and low-performing students in the subject, but it does create a self-fulfilling prophecy: Highly anxious students tend to think they are “not math people” and avoid math tasks, limiting their ability to improve their skills, and the same stress can interfere with their ability to recall and use the skills they do have on tests.
Over time, math anxiety reduces student performance, which in turn increases the discomfort with the subject and makes it less likely they will pursue careers in science and math fields.
And many of these students never outgrow their fears. A majority of adults report discomfort with math—including 1 in 4 educators, according to the EdWeek Research Center survey. This can lead to intergenerational and even societal disconnection from math.
Adults’ own math discomfort can also affect their students’ math anxiety. Studies find highly math-anxious parents are more likely to have math-anxious children—and that interventions encouraging families to explore math can build confidence in both parents and children.
Educators aren’t immune from this discomfort. More than a third of educators surveyed told the EdWeek Research Center that they felt uneasy in the math classes they took as students, and the same share said they feel anxious when they have to do math now.
Students—particularly girls and students of color, who experience stereotypes of poor math performance—have also been found to be more likely to develop math anxiety over time if they are taught by math-anxious teachers.
Building effective interventions for math anxiety
Because math anxiety is not just about a student’s objective math performance, effective interventions must address a student’s academic gaps, work habits, and the “emotional and cognitive issues” associated with the anxiety.
Exposure. First and foremost, anxious students must continue to be exposed to and challenged by math. In the classroom, this means encouraging whole-class discussions rather than calling on just a few students and assigning group work to ensure all students are actively solving problems.
Some interventions that improve math performance overall also reduce anxiety.
Intensive tutoring in math—involving individualized or very-small-group instruction by a trained tutor for at least 30 minutes and four days a week—has been shown to accelerate learning growth in the subject, but results are more mixed when it comes to reducing outright fear. For severely math anxious students, studies suggest it can be helpful to treat tutoring like exposure therapy, with tutors directly correcting not only conceptual misunderstandings but also false perceptions (e.g., “I’m not a math person”).
Collaboration might help anxious students be more comfortable doing math in the classroom. One international study found peer tutoring in which students learned to focus on “praise, patience, and respect” improved math-anxious middle schoolers’ performance and anxiety related to learning math—though they remained fearful of math testing.
Similarly, encouraging families to engage in math games and puzzles at home can help reduce anxiety in both parents and children.
Improve study skills. Anxious students study less efficiently, focusing on passive activities like reading notes.
“Solving math problems can help you to understand where gaps may be; you may not notice those things if you’re just reviewing practice problems,” said Jalisha Jenifer, an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College of Columbia University who researches math anxiety. “Without challenging yourself in those ways, you’re not exposing yourself to the information that you may then need for that final exam.”
Teaching study strategies explicitly and providing both partially worked and unworked math problems as part of regular test-prep can improve math study habits, Jenifer said.
Using math journals and data reviews can help students learn to track and recognize their own progress in math, said Vanessa Vakharia, a K-12 math teacher and instructional coach in Ontario, Canada. She suggested teachers create a “failure wall,” in which students post descriptions of mistakes and what they have learned from them.
“If someone comes in and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so upset I failed this entire quiz on integers,’ I’ll be like, ‘Write it down, and on the back, what did you learn?’” she said. “Then [the wall is] so populated that when a student’s feeling bad about failure, I’m like, ‘Go read all the other ones.’”
Timing. Timed math activities like “math minutes,” in which students race to calculate a high number of problems in a minute, are broadly used to help develop automaticity with math facts. Results have been mixed about whether timed math tests increase student anxiety enough to affect performance, but experts agree that how these activities are structured and presented can make a big difference.
For example, while comparing students with each other can boost stress, challenging students to beat their own times can motivate them.
Reframing. Teachers should encourage students to manage their anxiety rather than avoid it.
Reframing and reinterpreting physical symptoms—the galloping heartbeat, sweaty palms, and swooping stomach—as signs of excitement encourages growth mindset and resilience rather than feeling threatened.
Building identity. Students from groups traditionally underrepresented in math—including girls, students of color, and students with disabilities—have been shown at higher risk for developing math anxiety.
Fostering a strong math and science identity is “paramount” to help students from traditionally underrepresented groups deal with anxiety in the subject, said Kristen Hengtgen, who studies science, technology, engineering, and math pipeline issues for the nonprofit group EdTrust.
“We have all this research that shows students of color, as well as girls and students with disabilities, are less likely to have a strong STEM identity,” Hengtgen said, “but ... if you feel comfortable in the class, you feel like you belong, you feel like this is your thing, you’re more likely to persist in the face of challenges.
“Fostering that identity means providing joyful STEM content—content that’s relevant to students’ lives and communities—and having diverse teachers who can show a positive role model as a math person,” Hengtgen added.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
