Neuroscience: Neural Correlates of Math Anxiety

November 27, 2012November 22, 2012 by Learning-Activist

Since posting my previous piece (When Learning Hurts – Toxic Learning) earlier this week, another blog focused on medical neuroscience posted a great overview of math anxiety called “Brain Markers of Math Anxiety“. The post refers to a study “The Neurodevelopmental Basis of Math Anxiety” that has identified the neural correlates of math anxiety for the first time, and with findings that have significant implications for its early identification and treatment.

Bottom lines:

1) Math anxiety contributes to poor math performance by reducing the “working memory, attention, and cognitive-control processes engaged during math problem solving”.

2) “The study underscores the importance of assessment and treatment of math anxiety in children. Reduction in math anxiety may be a key component in improving math skills and in the success of remedial math interventions.”

Math anxiety is the just tip of the iceberg. The effects of anxiety on other learning challenges are harder to measure but arguably just as devastating and affecting and even greater number of students. When working out math problems students have time to think about what they are doing. In the case of reading, the speed of processing required to create the simulated language stream is too fast for conscious thought. Anxiety/shame interruptions to working memory and attention during learning to read are far more learning disabling.

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Ultimately what’s going to shift the behavior of the country over the long-term is understanding how fundamental this [healthy learning] is to everybody through the economic channel. …We must come up with a way of describing, measuring, and supporting the health of children’s learning. It is the unhealthy learning environments that are the problem.

Yes, that’s the message. That’s the message you’ve got to get across. Arthur Rolnick Senior V.P. and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Associate Economist with the Federal Open Market Committee.

It’s not that somebody ‘knows’ the current science, because the current science might be wrong. But it’s that somebody knows how to learn about new science, and adapt. It’s also how they learn to adapt to workplaces… how to learn to do something that they had never even thought about doing when they were in school. That’s the key element. Dr. Eric Hanushek Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

So then the fundamental intention of our education system must be to use knowledge, skills and experience not just as the end, but as the means through which we’re exercising how well someone is able to participate and become self-extending in learning what they need to learn when they need to learn it.

Precisely.

The Institute for the Study and Prevention of ACQUIRED Learning Disabilities.

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