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No good at math? No problem!

by Sarah Gould

… riiiiiiight …

I hate math. No, really; I hate math. I have never been good at math, and once teachers started mixes letters with the numbers, I really started to struggle with it. Give me letters over numbers any day! So, when I began reading about why people do poorly on math exams, I was worried that there’d be fewer letters than numbers … thankfully it was mostly words.

Last Saturday researchers released the astounding pronouncement that worrying about how you may perform on a math exam may actually contribute to a lower score. No? Really!? Mark Ashcraft, a psychology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (who spoke on on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco) says that the feelings of dread & anxiety surrounding math can “sap the brain’s limited amount of working capacity” which is needed when solving difficult math problems.

While simply math tasks such as addition (I’m okay with addition) only require a small bit of a person’s “working memory,” the harder computations (does subtraction count as harder?) require more brain power. The worrying about the complicated math tests you may be taking takes up a large chunk of a tester’s memory which “spell[s] disaster for the anxious student … taking a high-stakes test.” That would be me.

Stress can even turn my best friend (the junior high math teacher) into a math student like me. “All of a sudden [good math students] start looking for shortcuts,” said University of Chicago researcher Sian Beilock. While the cause of this anxiety is unknown, Ashcraft mentions that people who can overcome the anxiety have completely “normal” math proficiency!

It’s absolutely strange to me; math scares the bejeebus out of me, but give me a vocabulary or literary exam and I’m good to go with no problem. Just keep the numbers as far from my exams as possible and I’ll bring in the highest percentage of correct answers!

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Posted in Anxiety Disorders, Education, Personal on February 26th, 2007

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One Response to “No good at math? No problem!”

  1. Mom Is Teaching » Blog Archive » Schooled Says:
    October 8th, 2007 at 6:00 am

    [...] follow their own passions have an easier time learning. Why? Because they want to learn! Where as worrying over tests and performance and scores can lower how well you actually do. Did You Enjoy this Post? Subscribe to Mom Is Teaching. It’s Free! « Back Home Posted in [...]

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