What helps students with math anxiety?
Calming down a student during a test may not fix their math anxiety
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You’ve probably seen it happen: a student in math class is sure that he understands the material, but blanks on test day. His palms sweat, his mind races, and afterward he says something like “I felt like I couldn’t think!”
This sort of panicked reaction has long been what comes to mind when we think about students who struggle with math anxiety. But researchers like us have started to discover that, surprisingly, anxiety in a test situation may not be the core reason why math-anxious students underperform. This insight could dramatically change our understanding of how to help these students succeed.
Why students who are anxious about math struggle
For decades, researchers’ explanation for why math-anxious students tend to struggle with math went something like this: When students who are anxious about math take a math test, they become, well, anxious. This anxiety, and other worries that come with it, eat up valuable mental resources the student would otherwise use for the math itself. Because math often means juggling several ideas at once, any dip in mental bandwidth can keep students from performing at their best.
While non-anxious students can focus entirely on solving problems, anxious students must divide their attention between doing the math and managing their emotions. No wonder they do worse.
But over time, researchers began to wonder whether this explanation told the whole story. Why else might students who feel anxious about math perform poorly? If something makes you anxious, you’re less likely to devote yourself to it consistently. Math-anxious students may spend less time practicing math during homework or in their free time, leading to fewer opportunities to build skills and confidence. That means their struggles might stem not only from anxiety in the moment, but also from how that anxiety shapes the way they engage with math in the first place.
Understanding the “why” behind math-anxious students’ struggles could enable us to help students, instead of leaving them behind. If poor math performance is due mostly to nerves in the moment, then teaching students how to calm down during tests should solve most of the problem. But if anxiety is only part of the story, we need to pinpoint and target the other factors holding students back.
“Their struggles might stem not only from anxiety in the moment, but also from how that anxiety shapes the way they engage with math in the first place.”
How students react under pressure
To understand more, we ran a study to see to what extent anxiety explains the underperformance of math-anxious students. College students completed a short pre-survey that asked them, among other things, to rate how math-anxious they were. Then, they came into our lab to complete short but challenging math tasks. We saw a range of anxious and not anxious students, and we asked them all how anxious they felt before and after each task. At the same time, we measured how their bodies reacted under pressure by tracking physiological signals like heart rate. Measuring how quickly their hearts sped up or slowed down in response to the pressure they were feeling showed us how their bodies responded to the pressure of doing math.
We found that in-the-moment anxiety does explain some of the link between math anxiety and math performance – but only about a third of it. That means that while anxiety clearly plays a role, two-thirds of the connection must come from something else. Our finding challenges decades of assumptions and suggests that improving these students’ performance will take more than simply calming nerves.
When we took a closer look, we saw that anxiety matters more for some math-anxious students than others. Examining patterns in how students said they felt, how their bodies reacted, and how they performed during math tasks, we found that in-the-moment anxiety played very different roles for different students. For some students, spikes of in-the-moment anxiety were the main cause of their poor math performance. Surprisingly, though, in-the-moment anxiety played barely any role at all in the underperformance of some math-anxious students.
The reason why math-anxious students struggle with math can differ from one student to the next. As a result, a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with math anxiety is doomed to leave many math-anxious students behind. Our best guess as to why math-anxious students who are able to remain calm still tend to underperform has to do with avoidance – it could be that students who can remain calm in the moment are more likely to have avoided engaging with math in the past and thus have less practice. We can’t be sure of that from this research alone, though, and there are many other possible explanations. This is an important next piece of the puzzle for math anxiety researchers to explore.
“Understanding why a student is struggling allows adults to help them do their best, an insight that we think applies beyond math anxiety to all learning. “
How to help students perform well despite math anxiety
This depends on why math anxiety is a problem for each individual student. If in-the-moment anxiety is the main issue for students, then tools that help them regulate their anxiety ahead of a test could be a solution. A technique like cognitive reappraisal, for example, can help them think about the situation differently and recognize that “I’m feeling this way because I care, and the stress I’m feeling can fuel my focus.” Or they might be encouraged to engage in expressive writing, which allows them to put their worries down on paper and directly engage with their anxiety. They might write, “I’m feeling worried about this math test – if I don’t score well I’m afraid I’ll do poorly in the class.” If the issue is something like a lack of practice, though, all the calmness in the world likely won’t help – that student just needs to spend more time practicing math.
How can you determine whether a student is feeling anxious during a test, and whether their anxiety is undermining their performance? We think the answer is pretty simple: just ask. If a student says that worrying a lot during a test has interfered with their ability to think, then finding ways to help them calm down during a test may be just what that student needs. If not, the reason for their underperformance must lie elsewhere.
Understanding why a student is struggling allows adults to help them do their best, an insight that we think applies beyond math anxiety to all learning.
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