When parents with high math anxiety help with homework, children learn less

If the thought of calculating a tip at a restaurant makes you nervous, then you are not alone. Math anxiety is common worldwide.

Math anxiety can lead to poor performance and also deter people from taking math courses. This is because feelings of anxiety can tie up important cognitive resources (known as working memory), which are needed for solving math problems.

But why are some people more math anxious than others? And is there a link between parents’ math anxiety and their children’s math anxiety?

As researchers who study the role of cognitive and emotional factors in achievement, these are some of the questions that my colleagues and I have been examining. We find that when parents with math anxiety help with homework, it could have a negative impact on their kids.

Social factors contribute to math anxiety

Math anxiety can start early. Children as young as six can experience varying degrees of math anxiety which is linked to poor math achievement.

While recent research suggests that some people are predisposed to develop math anxiety, and that there may be a genetic component to this predisposition, the social factors that can lead someone to develop math anxiety are also important to understand.

Recently, we examined the link between parents’ math anxiety and their children’s math anxiety and math achievement.

We assessed the math anxiety and math achievement levels of 438 first- and second-grade children at both the beginning and the end of the school year. We assessed their parents’ math anxiety level. We also assessed how often they helped their children with their math homework.

Fun and Free Summer Learning Resources

Summer learning loss is a real problem. Alarmingly, research suggests students lose more than two months of math knowledge during the summer, and the losses in reading are similar.

Here we’ve compiled a few resources to keep students learning through the dog days of summer, with a particular focus on math and reading. For starters, the Edutopia blog How to Beat Summer Learning Loss from Anne O’Brien is chock full of useful information and strategies for parents and students.

Fun! Fun! Fun! Summer Learning Sites

Summer Learning Resources for Parents From Colorín Colorado: This reading resource roundup for parents is awesome! The page features guides, tips, and reading lesson ideas in Spanish and English. Another great resource from sister site Reading Rockets is Get Ready for Summer! Ideas for Teachers to Share With Families.

Cool Summer Reading and Learning for Middle School Kids: Author Susan Curtis highlights some of the most useful websites, ideas, and strategies for helping middle school students stay active readers during the summer. Included are links to reading lists, online reading contests, and ideas for practicing reading with tech tools. Also check out Awesome Apps for the Six Traits of Writing, from WeAreTeachers, for improving writing skills with apps during the summer.

Calculation Nation From the NCTM: If you're looking for a fun, web-based game for students, Calculation Nation from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is a wonderful resource. This is just one example; there are tons of awesome games. Also check out Funbrain Math Arcade from Pearson, 10 Best Math Apps for Kids from Parents.com, and Cool Math.

Summer Learning Resources for Parents From ReadWriteThink: This after-school and parent collection from ReadWriteThink offers something for everything. There are links to summer activities and projects, games and tech tools, printouts, and how-to articles. Plus, there's a link to a useful podcast series about out-of-school learning.

Nash’s mind left a beautiful legacy

Death of game theory pioneer ends a genius’s dramatic story.

His mind was beautiful, but troubled. His math was just beautiful.

John Forbes Nash Jr., who died in a traffic accident on May 23, gained more fame than most mathematicians, though not only on account of his math. His battle with schizophrenia, described artfully by Sylvia Nasar in her book A Beautiful Mind, made for drama suitable for a movie. Russell Crowe played Nash in the 2001 film, which garbled the math but made the point that despite his affliction, Nash accomplished works of genius — particularly in the theory of games.

That genius emerged in the 1940s when Nash was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech, the forerunner to Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. He started out as an electrical engineering student, but soon shifted to chemical engineering and then just plain chemistry. But the lab was not for him. He switched to math, and by age 20 he was on his way to graduate school at Princeton with a one-sentence letter of recommendation from a Carnegie professor: “This man is a genius.”

At Princeton, Nash revolutionized economic theory, showing how the freshly developed game theory of the great John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern could be made more relevant to real life. In their book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern had attempted to derive a mathematics of strategy. They showed how participants in an economy could choose the most profitable behaviors. Von Neumann, one of the foremost mathematicians of his time, and Morgenstern, an economist, realized that their math could be applied to human behavior more broadly, evaluating strategic choices in realms from poker to warfare.

But the original theory offered rigorous solutions only for two-person games where the winner won what the loser lost (hence the label “zero-sum” game). Nash extended game theory both to cooperative situations (where win-win scenarios were possible) and to competitive games with multiple players.

Out of this work came the concept of the “Nash equilibrium,” the set of strategies that guaranteed the best possible payoff for all participants. Nash’s genius was to prove that at least one such set of strategies was always possible. In other words, as the economist Samuel Bowles once put it, there is always “a situation in which everybody is doing the best they can, given what everybody else is doing.”

Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere!

Bubbles are scientific?

That was the question I had when I first realized there was a Bubbles show at Science World at TELUS World of Science. Then, after watching the show and learning more about bubbles leading up to doing my own first Bubbles show performance, I learned that there is actually a lot of science and math involved. Even more, there’s a special chemistry and geometry when it comes to making bubbles.

What's bubble chemistry?

 

Well, bubbles are more than just a soap solution filled with air. Bubbles are actually made from a bubble film that looks like a sandwich with soap on the outsides and water on the inside. The soap works to reduce the surface tension of water so that the water can stretch. This means that bubble film is elastic and stretches out and snaps back to its original shape.

 

 
Why are bubbles round?
This is where the math comes in. Forming a bubble takes energy and bubbles want to form a shape that is the least stretched out. This shape must have the least amount of surface area for its size. The shape that results is a sphere. This is why bubbles are round when they are floating through the air around us!

Music and math: The genius of Beethoven

How is it that Beethoven, who is celebrated as one of the most significant composers of all time, wrote many of his most beloved songs while going deaf? The answer lies in the math behind his music. Natalya St. Clair employs the "Moonlight Sonata" to illustrate the way Beethoven was able to convey emotion and creativity using the certainty of mathematics. 

Better at reading than maths? Don’t blame it all on your genes

I disliked and feared maths for most of my school career and dropped it as soon as I possibly could. My mother recalls me crying as a five-year-old because: “I can’t do the people-on-the-bus sums”. If the bus has 12 passengers and three get off, how many are left? English, by contrast, was a breeze. At seven, I stood on a chair with a microphone and read my version of Sleeping Beauty aloud to the entire school. Reading and writing already ranked high among my passions.

Mine isn’t an unfamiliar tale. Many people label themselves as “not a maths person” or “not much of a reader”, often while they are still children. And yet, in a recent study published in Nature Communications, scientists showed that around half of the genes that affect how well 12-year-olds in the UK perform in maths also affect how good they are at reading. And they showed this in a new and important way.

For the first time ever, this study – led by UCL’s Oliver Davis, Chris Spencer at Oxford and Robert Plomin at King’s College London – was able to estimate genetic influences on learning abilities using DNA alone. The implications of this for future genetically sensitive research in the behavioural and social sciences are highly significant. It is certainly much easier to get hold of DNA than it is to get hold of a results from a large twin sample – another good way of researching this area.

How to teach … mental arithmetic

Practising mathematics doesn't just help students develop academically, it's also a useful life skill. Here's a collection of lesson ideas and resources to help teachers get started.

 

 

In a world full of gadgets and technology it's easy to be lazy about things like adding numbers in your head. Even a simple calculator is often more favourable to counting on both hands.

But encouraging pupils to practise their mental maths doesn't just help them tackle increasingly complex mathematical problems, it's also a really useful life skill – whether that's checking your change or working out how long you have to wait for the next train.
So this week, we have a variety of resources designed to boost your pupils' agility with arithmetic.

Attempts to make maths more fun are essential to engage students in the subject from a young age. Primary students might enjoy a mental maths quiz in an audio format. It asks 15 questions that become progressively more difficult based on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and time. If this works well and you would like to try more of this type of activity, further tests are available on the Teaching Packs website.

For secondary pupils, Mel Muldowney, one of the teachers behind the Just Maths website, suggests putting these 30 mental arithmetic questions on the board as a settling activity as students come into the room.

National Museum of Mathematics is antidote to math phobia

Few equations confront a visitor to the National Museum of Mathematics on Manhattan’s East 26th Street. Instead, museumgoers find children — and adults — riding the Coaster Roller (below), a small platform that offers a surprisingly smooth ride over acorn-shaped balls. (The trick lies in the objects’ diameter, which is the same in every direction.)

This physical, tactile, even rambunctious presentation of math is intentional, says museum cofounder Glen Whitney. Too many people think math is “boring, useless, too hard, irrelevant, stifling, something that people don’t use,” says Whitney, a former math professor and hedge fund analyst. He wants to show people “the breadth and the beauty and the creativity that are inherent in mathematics.”

The museum, also known as MoMath, seems to be succeeding. School groups come through in waves. Preteen boys execute Dance Dance Revolution–style moves on a lighted grid where ever-shifting lines display the shortest path connecting everyone on the floor. High school students compete to see how many magnetic monkey shapes they can tessellate, or link together. At the Enigma Café no coffee is served, but plenty of geometrical games are; players are encouraged to sit and solve together.

Number of students studying Stem courses in UK at record high

New figures show a 12% increase in those studying computer science – the highest total in a decade.

 

 

More students than ever have been accepted on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) courses, according to new figures published by the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce).

In 2013-14, 98,000 students were accepted on to Stem undergraduate courses, the highest level ever recorded.

This is an 8% rise on last academic year, and an 18% rise since 2002-03.

Acceptances on to engineering and technology courses "bounced back" by 6% after a decline, returning to the peak levels of 2010-11. Acceptances to computer science courses increased by 12% compared with the previous year, and are now at their highest point since 2003-04.

In addition to the numbers of students accepted on to courses, Hefce also looks at the figures for those applying. It finds applications for Stem courses are similarly buoyant. The biggest increase in applications has been in computer sciences, at 13%, but applications in engineering and technology also rose by 11% compared to the previous cycle.

Yvonne Baker, director of the National Science Learning Centre, which is run by a consortium of universities and provides continuing professional development (CPD) for science teachers, welcomes the news: "This shows that students are taking seriously the messages about high-value qualifications and also that the emphasis put on supporting Stem by employers, charities and government through initiatives like Project Enthuse, which supports teacher CPD, is having real impact."

Girls are kept out of science jobs by unhelpful stereotypes

The number of girls taking A-level physics has remained stagnant for the past 20 years or more, and the UK has the lowest proportion of female engineers in the EU. Progress on gender equality in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is frustratingly slow.

And what’s even more worrying is that when questioned, Brits can’t think of current women scientists as role models. A recent YouGov poll of 3,000 people done for ScienceGrrl, a not-for-profit of which I am a director that advocates for more women in science careers, found one in ten named Isambard Kingdom Brunel – a male engineer – when asked to think of a famous women scientist. Only about half could actually name a female scientist and of those that did, 68% named Marie Curie, who died in 1934.

In a new report called Through Both Eyes also by ScienceGrrl, we set out the case for looking at the issue in light of the society we live in, and the legacy of inequalities between men and women.

Lack of progress isn’t due to a lack of attention or awareness. The Institute of Physics has compiled a series of comprehensive reports since 2004 and government frequently makes the economic case for diversity in science, technology, maths and engineering (STEM).

The Countries Where Kids Are Terrified of Math

A new study shows Tunisian teenagers are the world's most anxious regarding the subject. 

 

Tunisia, Argentina, Brazil and Thailand are home to some of the world’s most math-phobic 15-year-olds.

Levels of “mathematics anxiety” in those countries were the highest among the nations tracked by the OECD as part of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests that the organization coordinates.

The chart below shows Tunisian teenagers are most anxious about math among those tested, and the Netherlands as the least, with the Czechs and Slovaks closest to the OECD average.

What makes Chinese maths lessons so good?

Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand multiplication, pupils have to memorise the multiplication rhyme: “four times eight is 32, five times eight is 40” and so on, which was invented by ancient Chinese scholars 2,200 years ago.

Stemming from this tradition, most classrooms have few concrete teaching materials for maths lessons. The cultural traditions of Chinese maths education lead people to believe that routine practice is the most efficient way to learn.

This continues today. And as a result, schools in Shanghai have scored highly in recent years on international tests of maths ability. It is this aptitude for maths among Chinese schoolchildren that has led the UK government to announce plans to bring over 60 maths teachers from Shanghai to help teach in centres of excellence.

How the ancient Greeks shaped modern mathematics – video animation

In this Royal Institution animation about a group of revolutionary thinkers who changed the way we see mathematics, we see that maths isn't just about performing calculations, but a way of understanding and testing the reality of the world around us. Ancient thinking is still helping engineers, scientists, economists, architects gain a better understanding of our world

This project was supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Animation by 12foot6. Narrated by James Grime.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/mar/12/ancient-greeks-modern-mathematics-video?CMP=twt_gu 

Gesturing with hands is a powerful tool for children’s math learning

Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to new research from University of Chicago’s Department of Psychology.

Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.

“We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, whereas gesturing led to deeper and more flexible learning,” explained the study’s lead author, Miriam A. Novack, a PhD student in psychology.

The study, “From action to abstraction: Using the hands to learn math,” is published online by Psychological Science.

The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates

Semir Zeki^1*, John Paul Romaya¹, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa² and Michael F. Atiyah³

• ¹Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology, University College London, London, UK
• ²Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK
• ³School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Many have written of the experience of mathematical beauty as being comparable to that derived from the greatest art. 

This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such a highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.

See The Beauty Of Math, Even If You Don’t Understand Math

Vizualizing complex math equations is a privilege for a unique few--that is, until you place them within real world context.

 There comes a moment in most of our lives when we realize that some secrets of the universe will remain hidden from us--not because mankind hasn't discovered them, but because those secrets are encoded in complex math and physics problems that few of us have the talent or patience to understand.

 

But Beauty of Mathematics, a new video by Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux, gives the mathematically challenged a peek into living equations. The animated triptych shows an equation on the left, its quantified schematics in the center, and its real world manifestation on the right. The video is like academic X-ray vision, but in reality, its inspiration was never math or science. It was beauty.

Babies Are Born With Some Math Skills

 

   Melissa Libertus

Before and after. Infants' ability to discern between different numbers of dots predicted their mathematical aptitude several years later.

If a 6-month-old can distinguish between 20 dots and 10 dots, she’s more likely to be a good at math in preschool. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that part of our proficiency at addition and subtraction may simply be something we’re born with.

Researchers have long wondered where our math skills come from. Are they innate, or should we credit studying and good teachers—or some combination of the two? “Math ability is a very complex concept, and there are a lot of actors that play into it,” says Ariel Starr, a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.