What and how students learn can have toxic effects on how well they learn thereafter. It’s vitally important that educators understand this.
A recently released study of math anxiety, When math hurts: math anxiety predicts pain network activation in anticipation of doing math is the latest addition to a growing body of neuroscience that demonstrates that anxiety is toxic to learning.
The study shows that when anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher our math anxiety, the more our brains increase activities associated with threat detection and the experience of pain. They go on to point out that it is the anticipation of math tasks, not the actual performance of math tasks that causes the most pain.
Math anxiety affects about 50 percent of the U.S. population. Anxiety over reading and writing are at least as widespread (if less studied). Test anxiety affects between 25 and 40%. Speaking anxiety (Public speaking) is the number one social fear of adults.
Math-anxiety, reading-anxiety, writing-anxiety, test-taking-anxiety, (public speaking, singing, dancing…) are all performance anxieties that, for the most part, develop in school. Though a small percentage of the population has innate learning disabilities (genetically ordained differences in brain wiring that impairs their learning), the great majority who develop these anxieties learn to develop them in school.
In my live events, I frequently ask educators how they feel about their math abilities. Typically less than a 1/3rd indicate they feel good about them and about ½ feel bad about them. I then ask how many think their difficulties with math are the result of the way they were introduced to and/or taught math, rather than some kind of innate math-processing weakness. Virtually everyone who previously indicated they didn’t feel good about their math abilities raises their hands.
When we approach a challenging task with anxiety about our performance, our brains’ emotional arousal drains the mental energy and distracts from the attentional focus we need to learn to improve our performance (at the task we are anxious about). These ‘learning anxieties’ act like negative feedback loops and, all too often, they lead to downward spirals: the more anxiety, the worse our performance; the worse our performance, the more our anxiety.
The reason these anxieties can be so potently learning-disabling is that at root they are not really about math or reading or writing or test-taking. These anxieties are not about the tasks; they are about how we feel about the tasks. What we most dread – most fear – is not the ‘fact’ of failure, it’s the feeling of failure – it’s the shame.