Maths anxiety hits children

May 01, 2005

<b>LONDON —</b> British psychologists have identified a syndrome in children as young as 10 that they call “maths anxiety”, which prevents otherwise intelligent people from coping with even the simplest arithmetic tasks. <br>

LONDON — British psychologists have identified a syndrome in children as young as 10 that they call “maths anxiety”, which prevents otherwise intelligent people from coping with even the simplest arithmetic tasks.

Maths anxiety was a form of anxiety in its own right which affected performance, Sheila Ford, told the annual conference of the British Psychological Society.

“It doesn’t just apply to people who are poor at maths,” she said.

Ford’s team at Staffordshire University suggested that the condition interfered with the brain’s working memory. They have begun looking at using relaxation techniques to overcome the problem.

“People, who are perfectly competent at maths can be affected in a way that makes them perform less well than they would do without maths anxiety.

“We think it interferes with working memory, which is the memory you need to do calculations. It’s thought that what happens is that anxious thoughts compete with the memory resources we need to do maths,” Ford said.

The team checked 48 university students aged 18 to 25 for maths anxiety using a psychological questionnaire which produced a score of one to 100. The lowest score was two, while the most maths anxious individual was rated at 94, indicating a vast range.

The team also gave the students multiple tasks, finding that maths anxiety impacted on their ability to carry out non-maths assignments.

The more maths anxious the students were, the less well they were able to multi-task by memorizing letters at the same time as carrying out calculations.
Maths-anxious-students had difficulty in remembering the running order of letter sequences. This indicated a problem with “serial processing” which is also essential for counting, Ford said.

Ford’s team is now investigating at what stage in life maths anxiety first emerges.
“It has certainly been identified in 10-year-olds. I suspect it might emerge from a child’s first experiences in a school situation with teachers.”

Maths is very precise - it’s either right or wrong. The fear of getting the answer wrong might trigger off maths anxiety in some children,” she said.

dpa

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});