Teenagers across the world are becoming more afraid of math.
Math anxiety—feeling tense, worried, or helpless while doing or thinking about doing math—has risen over the past decade, according to self-reports from 15-year-olds on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.
The change could be “detrimental to lifelong learning,” according to a report released this month analyzing the latest set of results from the 2022 test administration.
“Students who develop negative feelings towards mathematics at schools may be less likely to opt for further education that includes mathematics,” the report reads. “They may avoid reskilling opportunities that involve mathematics as well.”
It’s hard to know what’s causing the trend, said Moriah Sokolowski, an assistant professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada who studies mathematical thinking. It could be related to students’ perception that their math performance has high-stakes consequences, she said, noting that the past decade has seen growth in well-paying jobs with substantial math and science demands.
The pandemic likely also plays a role, said Lindsey Engle Richland, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.
“One thing we just can’t get away from is that there was a major decrease in math achievement after the COVID pandemic, and we’re still recovering,” Richland said. “We know that math anxiety and math achievement go hand in hand.”
Still, there are a few countries that deviate from this pattern—most significantly, Korea, where the percentage of students who reported experiencing math anxiety decreased from 44 percent in 2012 to 32 percent in 2022.
The result is notable in a country known for its culture of intense academic competition, where many students attend “cram schools” following the regular school day.
Historically, Korean students have scored high on international benchmarks of math ability, including PISA, but low on measures of student confidence in the subject, said Jaekyung Lee, a professor of education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who has studied the differences between the United States and Korean education systems.
Two decades of changes designed to lower the pressure—coupled with the effects of the pandemic—may have started to shift the tide, he said.
How math instruction affects math anxiety—and vice versa
Math anxiety has a cyclical relationship with math ability, said Richland.
Kids who are stressed about taking a math test, for example, have a harder time focusing on their calculations. That makes it more likely that they’ll get the problems wrong.
But the relationship also goes the other way, Richland said. Helping students get better at math can actually decrease their anxiety.
Having a strong grasp of the basics—like multiplication tables, for example—can free up cognitive resources, making it easier to handle complex work, said Sokolowski.
In the United States, national math education organizations and influential states have de-emphasized memorization and repeated practice, moving toward more of a focus on open-ended problem-solving. (Math education researchers maintain that both are necessary—fluency with basic facts and procedures helps deepen conceptual understanding, and vice versa.)
This shift, in part, was meant to lessen students’ negative feelings toward math, engaging them in more critical thinking and application-oriented problems. But it’s possible that it could have had the opposite effect, said Sokolowski.
“It could be this feedback cycle where kids aren’t mastering the basics, and aren’t able to get to these higher problems, which is leading to math anxiety,” she said.
In Korea, by contrast, students spend a lot of time ensuring they have a solid grasp on math concepts. Most attend tutoring at dedicated after-school institutes, called hagwons—long hours of study that families hope will give their children a leg up in competitive college admissions.
“The purpose of private tutoring is not to catch up. It’s to get ahead of the others,” said Lee.
But this high-pressure environment also breeds anxiety, Lee said. Over the past 20 years, Korean education reform has aimed to mitigate these issues, with government officials emphasizing students’ well-being and promoting student-centered pedagogy. These changes may have started to take hold, he said.
It could also be that Korean students fared better during the pandemic than teens in other countries.
“Korea had a relatively shorter period of school closure,” Lee said. “At the same time, they were also better able to provide support for students [during remote learning], because the country has very strong digital infrastructure.”
A decline in student mental health could play a role
It’s also possible that global changes in reports of math anxiety don’t actually have much to do with math achievement.
Teenagers may be more willing to say that math makes them anxious now than teenagers in previous years, even if the two groups felt similarly, said Sokolowski. “Mental health is less of the taboo thing that it once was,” she said.
Children’s mental health is also declining in general. In 2021, 42 percent of high school students said that at some point in the previous year, they felt so sad or hopeless that they stopped engaging in their usual activities—compared to 26 percent in 2009.
“It may be that there’s this sort of globalized anxiety piece that’s playing into math performance as well,” Richland said.
Whether math anxiety stems from fear of the subject itself, or is tied to more general stress about school and the future, there are ways for teachers to address it in the moment.
“If anxiety is disrupting attention and executive function, having teachers use practices that reduce the load in learning can be helpful,” Richland said. One tool in mathematics, she added, could be worked examples: step-by-step explanations of how to solve a problem to which students can refer back.
Data from PISA show that certain teacher moves, such as encouraging students to find new ways to solve problems and prompting them to connect new and prior knowledge, are correlated with student reports of lower math anxiety.
Fostering the use of these strategies could help students cope with these feelings, the report suggests.
