Once you have it, it can be self-perpetuating. Worrying about it can make it worse, says Beilock, whose study of children between the ages of five and eight suggests maths anxiety might impede performance by taxing working memory. “Since our ability to focus is limited, our attention gets divided when we do more than one task at a time,” she says. “If you’re worried about having to do math, you may have an internal monologue saying you can’t do this and at the same time you’re trying to calculate numbers.”
And when people have maths anxiety they tend to avoid the subject, research from 2019 shows. But since maths builds on itself, avoiding it makes it harder to catch up. “Math is foundational. If you miss a certain idea, it’s harder to learn the next one,” says Darcy Hallett. “And then you can fall behind, which might make math more of a targeted anxiety compared to other topics.”
Teachers who love maths
Avoiding maths at school might work for those choosing to specialise in other subjects. But society loses out if too many people, including some who could actually be good at maths, avoid taking maths-related university courses or pursuing maths-related careers.
In the US, both the private and government sectors are suffering from a lack of STEM workers, while other countries are also struggling to fill shortages. So, experts are looking at measures that can be taken to tackle maths anxiety at different times of life.
Beilock posits that addressing the issue can begin in the home. Her research suggests that parents can pass on their anxieties when they help children with maths homework. But research by Beilock and her colleagues suggests that greater exposure to maths in the home – in this case children who regularly played maths games on an app with their parents – helps children perform better at school. Beilock believes doing maths with their children would also give parents more confidence in their own abilities, making them less likely to perpetuate the idea that maths can’t be learned.
Shulamit Kahn, an associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business who has written about the gender gap in STEM, believes giving students, particularly girls, good role models “is critical, especially at a young age”. She thinks the key is to get people, especially women, who love maths teaching younger children. That might mean more specific recruitment of people who have maths experience or more on-the-job maths-related training, she says.
