Maths Anxiety: What can a lecturer do?

During the course of my reading lately I've had to consider the effects of Maths anxiety on students in Higher Education and ways in which we can help students deal with the anxieties they experience and hopefully lessen them over time.

What is Maths Anxiety?

Maths anxiety is a vicious circle where a student finds mathematics difficult, becomes anxious about this, this anxiety negatively impacts on their learning and so they find maths even more difficult. Encounters with maths lectures/classes becomes a prompt for anxiety and so the student begins each encounter with a negative attitude. Mathematics Anxiety was described by Spicer (2004) as "an emotion that blocks a person's reasoning ability when confronted with a mathematical situation" (p.1). While a student is in a state of anxiety their working memory, which they need for working on their maths, is instead focused on how anxious they are. This anxiety negatively effects their learning and performance. They get bad marks, get even more convinced that they can't do maths and so the cycle continues.

What can we as educators do to help?

create a positive and supportive classroom environment. Building rapport with the students is key for this in my opinion.
provide opportunities for students to succeed in Maths i.e. provide questions that students can answer in order to build their confidence (Perkins and Shiel ,2016).
provide notes and resources to students ahead of time on a virtual learning environment (Marshall, et al., 2017). This gives students a chance to read through the notes in advance.
give students a mechanism to ask questions either anonymously or out of the spotlight (Marshall, et al., 2017). A digital backchannel (Du, Rosson, & Carroll, 2012) could provide such a means of communication and may be worth considering. Padlet was used by Marshall et al. (2017) for this purpose.
provide constructive and timely feedback (Simzar, Martinez, Rutherford, Domina, & Conley, 2015).

Marshall, E. E., Staddon, R. V., Wilson, D. A., & Mann, V. E. (2017). Addressing maths anxiety and engaging students with maths within the curriculum. MSOR Connections, 15(3), 28-35.

Perkins, R., & Shiel, G. (2016). Pisa in Classrooms: Implications for the teaching and learning of mathematics in Ireland.

Simzar, R. M., Martinez, M., Rutherford, T., Domina, T., & Conley, A. M. (2015). Raising the stakes: How students' motivation for mathematics associates with high- and low-stakes test achievement. Learning and individual differences, 39, 49-63.

Spicer, J. (2004). Resources to combat math anxiety. Eisenhower National.

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