As your teacher passes out the math test, your palms turn sweaty. You notice that your heart has begun to race. Glancing down at the page, you suddenly forget those operations on which you had drilled only a few days earlier. Do you perform all additions first in a complex calculation? Suddenly, you start to doubt a lot of things that you know.
If that sounds familiar, you might suffer from math anxiety. Or maybe not. Even researchers who study this condition note that it can be surprisingly hard to define math anxiety. After all, it's not an officially recognized mental disorder in the way that depression is.
It asks things like "how anxious would you feel about being given a set of division problems to solve on paper". Those who score high on these surveys about stress over making calculations related to numbers will be labeled math anxious. In general, people who panic over their math skills tend to do worse in math classes than people who don't mind numbers. "Just because you're math anxious, that doesn't always mean you're bad at math," notes Rose Vukovic, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Math anxiety affects people of all ages. It can lead to poor performance in math classes. Throughout life, this type of stress can stand in the way of mastering skills or projects in a host of areas that rely on calculations. But the good news is that the problem is manageable. Researchers are finding ways people can cope with this stress.
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A. But that's not always true. B. It has an unimaginable impact. C. And its impacts don't end at graduation. D. Oh, you know it well you're pretty sure, right? E. To diagnose math anxiety, researchers conduct a questionnaire. F. It's also hard to identify precisely how many people suffer from it. G. Math anxiety has also been linked to negative emotions from the past. |
