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| Math Anxiety and Math Sense Online Math 124: Math for Liberal Arts Suzanne Miller, DVC Instructor |
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| Math Anxiety Math Anxiety often results when students try to randomly learn just the "math facts" as separate bits of information. When students have no landmarks they must recall each 'math fact' independently. If information is forgotten a student has no strategy or structure to recover or reconstruct it . Anxiety increases. Students lose initiative and the confidence to take the next step to expand their knowledge. Without a solid foundation math becomes painful and is avoided. This process quickly becomes a downward spiral leading to math anxiety as early as third grade. "If the student fails, the step was too big" -Suzuki |
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| Developing Math Sense The opposite of the math anxiety spiral is the process of developing 'math sense'. Successfully using math requires more than just the knowing the 'facts'. Math has been described as the 'Science of Patterns'. When students learn both 'the facts' and the relationships linking them, they build a solid foundation of information and knowledge. When they forget a fact, they can return to the foundation to reconstruct it. Success builds the confidence to explore. Students move forward by linking new information to what they already know. This expands the foundation and process cycles upward. "The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again. - John Gray" |