Research & Discovery

Math Anxiety Is Contagious. This UVA Researcher Knows How To Break the Cycle

It’s an old joke that there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

Tanya Evans, an associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia, disagrees. Only a small percentage of people, she said, are inherently bad at math.

“When children or adults struggle with learning to read, the response is, ‘You can do this, and we will teach you how.’ But with math, it’s more of ‘Oh, you’re just not good at math,’ and that’s the end of it. It’s just accepted.”

Tanya Evans, an associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia, is using technology to better understand how math skills are processed in the brain. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)

Evans is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, which means she studies brain architecture and function, specifically how brain development enables children to acquire the skills needed to be successful in the classroom.

Evans said early education places a heavy emphasis on literacy, with children first learning to read and then reading to learn. Math literacy, however, is not as emphasized.

“You need both skills throughout your life. You need to read, but you also need to make budgets, pay your bills and manage medication schedules,” she said. “There are numbers all around us, and when you’re uncomfortable with them, it makes life more difficult.”

She explains that part of the discomfort with math may be due to math anxiety, passed on to children from math-averse parents.

“There’s some really interesting work showing that parents’ anxiety around doing math and even teachers’ anxiety around doing math can actually influence their children or their students,” Evans said. “Pregnant women see signs in the doctor’s office telling them to read to their children every day and sing songs to them every day, to help with their learning. But no one says to talk about math with your kids every day.”

Curious about how math is learned, Evans has joined with UVA colleague Daniel Lipscomb, Vanderbilt University’s Laurie Cutting, Michael Ullman from Georgetown University and others in studying 109 schoolchildren in second, third and fourth grades over several years to determine foundational skills that support learning math.

The study compared skills that support declarative memory, which is based on facts like where the nation’s capital is located, with those that focus on procedures, such as how to ride a bicycle.

The children performed simple memory tasks, like recalling objects after being shown photos, which researchers then compared to their later performance on math assessments. They repeated these tasks over several years, which gave researchers insight into the relationship between these skills across development.

They found that declarative memory is correlated with math skills in second through fourth grade and is also predictive of future math skills. Better performance on declarative memory tasks in second grade predicted better math skills in fourth grade.

“This indicates that basic memory tasks support future math learning, which tells us that math learning goes beyond the things we typically think of as math skills – like numbers, patterns and problem-solving. Problem-solving skills are important too, but without a solid foundation, there’s nothing to build upon.”

Evans, along with another collaborator at Georgetown, Ian Lyons, is now investigating how these basic memory skills relate to math learning at the brain level. They’re using similar tasks as in the behavioral work, but this time while children are having their brains scanned using fMRI. This process will enable researchers to identify the neural overlap between memory and math brain circuitry and better understand the mechanisms driving these relationships.

“In the past, kids were expected to memorize their multiplication tables and other math facts, and now there’s a greater focus on problem solving and less on memorization,” she said.

So, how can parents help their young ones be better at math? How can they become better themselves? There are tried-and-true flashcards and new smartphone apps, but there are simple ways, too.

“Make math a part of your daily activity with your kids from the get-go, instead of it being the subject just reserved for the classroom. For example, play simple matching memory games with young kids, counting steps when you’re walking or talking about prices when you’re in a grocery store,” she said.

“Thinking about or practicing basic math helps you with higher-level math and improves your ability to quickly recall the math facts that are necessary to solve problems,” Evans said. “You can make math conversation part of daily life. And when you’re more comfortable with it, your children are as well.”