15 March 2023

Join us as Dr Florence Gabriel explains how developing students’ self-regulation skills can help tackle maths anxiety in the classroom and why it can be beneficial to let students know that it’s ok to fail.  Dr Florence Gabriel is an Enterprise Fellow in Education Futures and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia.

Show Notes

• 2023 Numeracy Summit presentations 

Transcript

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by Dr. Florence Gabriel, who is the enterprise fellow in Education Futures, and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia.

Dr. Gabrielle, thanks for joining us.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So today we are talking about maths anxiety. We're going to take it out of the equation. I guess the first thing to kind of establish is what is maths anxiety?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Studies over the years have shown that many people have extremely negative attitudes towards mathematics, and that they can develop negative emotions when confronted with mathematics and these negative emotions, they can turn into a phobia of what we call mathematics anxiety.

Maths anxiety is a negative emotional response to mathematics, and it's often defined as feelings of tension, nervousness, or even fear that some people experience when doing mathematics at school, at work or in their everyday lives. And unfortunately, maths anxiety is a common problem in classrooms. If we look at piece of data, for example, select survey that's run by the OECD.

25% of Australian students report feeling helpless when solving a maths problem. And also, interestingly, neuroimaging studies have shown that students with high levels of maths anxiety they show more activation in brain regions associated with the detection and experience of pain, but it's pretty serious.

Dale Atkinson: That seems like a, like a pretty extreme reaction to something that we are exposed to pretty broadly in the education setting.

So for a lot of kids, what, what are they experiencing in terms of symptoms? Like what? What's visible to teachers when a child is, is experiencing mass anxiety?

Dr Florence Gabriel: There are different types of symptoms associated with maths anxiety, and it can cause physiological symptoms, and that includes increased heart rates and breathing rates, sweaty palms, stomach ache, or headaches.

It's also linked to emotional symptoms, so if you're a student who's starting to panic or if you are getting angry during a maths lesson, , it might be due to maths anxiety. There's one more type of symptom that's actually really important to learning, and these are cognitive symptoms. These cognitive symptoms, they can take the shape of invasive negative thoughts or ruminations or, or worries where you would think things like, Ugh, I'm never going to understand math, and these worries, they will overload your working memory.

Which is the type of memory that allows you to hold information in your head when you complete tasks, like mental calculations, for example, and obviously when your working memory is disrupted, well, your performance in mathematics will often suffer. Something that I don't think I have mentioned yet, but if you are math anxious, it doesn't mean that you are bad at math.

It just means that maybe some students would be deterred and wouldn't become the mathematicians, engineers, scientists, programmers, or, or economists that they could become because they feel too scared or anxious about mathematics. We want to avoid this situation and support our students and help them perform to the best of their abilities.

Dale Atkinson: So where does this all come from for students?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Unfortunately, it starts really early and mathematics anxiety appears to increase with age during childhood. So it can start as early as in year one or two, and it becomes quite strongly apparent from year four or five. And this may be due to general anxiety, increasing as children get older, but also because of exposure to other people's negative attitudes towards mathematics. It's also linked to experiences of failure or, or even just the threat of it, and also it's linked to changes in the content of mathematics itself. With maths becoming more complex and more abstract. Math anxiety is caused by pre-existing difficulties in mathematical cognition, but we shouldn't neglect social factors because they also play an important role. For example, if you were exposed to teachers who themselves suffered from maths anxiety, you’re more likely to develop math anxiety yourself, and studies have shown that this tends to be more often the case for girls than for boys.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think the public perception of mathematics and, and how it's all framed is an interesting phenomenon in that people will very readily describe themselves as incapable or, or not particularly adept when it comes to mathematical concepts in a way that they wouldn't do in terms of literacy.

Yeah, that's great. Often here or I'm not good at math, so I'm hopeless, but you'd never hear somebody say I'm hopeless with reading. These stereotypes are well and truly alive and, and it's something that we hear all too often.

Dale Atkinson: So how do we combat that in the classroom?

Dr Florence Gabriel: What's really important in the class is to build student confidence in their mathematical abilities.

And things that we can do to help combat these stereotypes is just making teachers aware of them. Studies from the US showing that if in-service teachers are made aware of stereotypes and stereotype threat around mathematics, it will actually change their attitudes and obviously teachers attitudes and their beliefs in their mathematical abilities will also influence their students attitudes and and their mathematical achievement.

There's actually a really interesting theory that comes from educational psychology that was put forward by Reinhard Pekrun, and it can help us understand how and why maths anxiety is happening in the classroom. And this theory is called the Controlled Value Theory of Achievement Emotions.So according to this control value theory, the experience of emotional achievement settings is determined by two types of appraisals, those relating to control, for example, that can be expectations for success or confidence or self-concept beliefs, and then appraisals relating to value.

And that could be the level of importance that a student gives to a task or a subject. This theory says that anxiety is rooted in poor control appraisals combined with higher levels of value, which means that if you care about mathematics but you don't feel in control of your learning in mathematics, you are likely going to experience anxiety.

So what we can do to help that is developing students' self-regulated learning skills because this will allow them to take control and take ownership of their learning. That's something that we're working on currently with my research team at at UniSA. Developing interventions built to develop students self-regulated learning in maths classroom.

Dale Atkinson: I was talking about the opportunity to interview you with one of my colleagues. They immediately jump to the work of Dr. Carol Dweck around, you know, the growth mindset and the fixed mindset and how the perception of the opportunity to learn and the idea that success is possible is such an important thing for a child when they're particularly in any learning space, but, but with mathematics.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. And I think building strong self-belief and that confidence in mathematical abilities is very important. Because, you know, sometimes we just feel negative emotions and it happens, but what really matters is what we do with these negative emotions and how we're going to regulate them so that. They don't negatively impact our learning.

Dale Atkinson: So what are some of the things that educators can do to create that sense of safety for a child to embrace the challenges of perceived difficulty?

Dr Florence Gabriel: What's really important is that children are allowed to fail and they feel comfortable and that they understand that failing is part of the learning process. Encouraging taking risks in the classroom, and that can be done by using open-ended problems, for example, where there's multiple solutions to our problems. Students can explore different ways of solving problems. Collaborative learning can help too. In this case, these are techniques that are proven to help students and reduce their anxiety as they're working on mathematics problems.

Dale Atkinson: Something for parents perhaps. What's the role of high expectations from parents to students in this area?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Parents' expectations for, for their children and, and how much they value mathematics themselves. They are also obviously associated with student attitudes and their outcomes in, in mathematics and research actually shows that parents' expectations can act as a, as a filter through which children understand their abilities and it will affect their expectations for success. There's really interesting research coming from the US on the impact of parents, mathematics, anxiety, and particularly when dealing with the children's homework. But it's not necessarily linked to pressure, but it's related to the maths anxiety that the parents experienced themselves.

If children ask their maths anxious parents for help with their math homework, it, it can actually backfire. And this is because parents can communicate their fears and their frustrations to their children who can then internalize all of that. In the worst case, avoid mathematics entirely. So the way we talk about mathematics and the language we use, is really important here.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think, it's probably the classic kind of challenge for any parent is not imprinting the negative perceptions of things on their own kids . So it's a, it's an extension out to mathematics in all parts of life. So you mentioned a bit earlier that a significant proportion of the adult population and a number of teachers experience maths anxiety themselves. What are some techniques that educators can avail themselves of to help to overcome?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Yeah, so unfortunately there is indeed a large value of evidence in the, in the research literature that shows that pre-service teachers have higher levels of maths anxiety compared to other university students who are studying things like business or health sciences, for example.

And unfortunately, these pre-service teachers are typically going to become teachers in early years or primary school. And, and the big issue here is that they will bring their maths anxiety with them into the classroom. And usually they tend to think that they are less capable of successfully teaching mathematics, and obviously that will have a negative impact on those students.

One of the, the biggest issues here is that maths anxiety can affect how teachers assess their own mathematical abilities. So the more mathematics teachers know, the more confident they will be in their mathematical ability. And one of the positive consequences of increasing teacher's self-efficacy beliefs in, in mathematics is that they tend to rate the importance of teaching mathematics to young children more highly.

It's really important to support pre-service and in-service teachers in this space. This support can take the form of professional development or enrolling in postgraduate courses, in in mathematics education, for example.

Dale Atkinson: It's something that really needs quite a bit of focus and, and I guess part of it is wraparound from colleagues who are confident and capable working with those who are perhaps a, a little bit more anxious and feel that anxiety. So really it's about, you know, getting together with your colleagues and, and one owning up to whatever anxieties you have, but having those conversations with people who are perceived within your teams as, as really strong in that area.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Absolutely. And I think having that safe space to talk about it freely and recognizing that maybe you are a bit anxious when you are teaching maths, but there's something you can do about it and, and working with your colleagues to, to help alleviate the symptoms you may feel when you are teaching maths yourself, that's definitely very helpful.

Dale Atkinson: We're very fortunate that you have agreed to provide, some of your expertise for a plink course that's going to be available to listeners and that'll be linked off to in the show notes, uh, when it comes available, what are the top three things that you want to get across to, to educators in that process?

Dr Florence Gabriel: The first thing I would say that, well, maths anxiety is very common and it's probably something you've seen in your students before. But the second point that I want to make is that we can actually do something about it. And self-regulated learning seems to be a good avenue to alleviate maths anxiety symptoms.

So helping children with their self-regulated learning and their emotional regulation, uh, will help them become more confident and less anxious when learning mathematics.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the interesting things about mathematics as opposed to, you know, we touched on literacy, uh, a bit earlier and, and lots of other areas of learning, is that it can be perceived to be right or wrong, you know, it's a pass fail binary kind of outcome in terms of the problem that's in front of you, which is not something that's apparent if you're discussing the humanities or if you're learning how to write or even, you know, you're reading it's okay to fail a little bit and then get some growth.

What role does that play in terms of maths anxiety, and how can that be alleviated by educators when confronting kids and letting them know it's okay not to get it right the first time.

Dr Florence Gabriel: It's important for teachers to allow children to understand that it's, it's okay to fail and, and to take risk in, in math classrooms.

And, and sometimes there's not a, a single right answer as well. It's, it might be true with simpler arithmetic, but if you work on more complex mathematics, there might be more than one way to arrive at a solution. So, focusing on, on that flexibility in terms of teaching and learning is really important as well.

And, and that's actually linked to all of that self-regulated learning and the, the executive functions that underline self-regulation. So, allowing children to come up with, flexible answers and different answers to a problem will help them in this case and hopefully alleviate some of the, the maths anxiety symptoms they would otherwise feel.

Dale Atkinson: I mean, so much of it, like all things in education, comes down to educator demeanour and perception of how the kids are experiencing that relationship with their educators. It's such an important factor, isn't it?

Dr Florence Gabriel: It is. It really is. Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: What's your final message to everyone out there in terms of giving maths a go?

Dr Florence Gabriel: I think it's really important for children to feel less anxious when it comes to mathematics. Mathematics is beautiful and it's also the gateway to many different careers. One of the long-term consequences of mathematics is the avoidance of anything that has to do with math. So any course or university degree or career that has mathematics in it.

So what we want to do is really support students here and make sure that they develop their full potential.

Dale Atkinson: Some great messages for, for educators, for parents, for students about, you know, being bold and giving things a go. Dr. Florence Gabrielle, thank you very much for your time.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you.