Stress-relief aids math education

The feeling is familiar: the sweat gathering on your palms, the panic throughout your entire body as the teacher hands you an empty test. It's math anxiety, and although common within the walls of Violette Hall, three professors have studied its effects at Moberly Area Community College.

Calm: Calming Anxiety to Learn Mathematics is a faculty forum that took place last Thursday night in Magruder Hall. With a grant from the Students Together Educating Peers program, Scott Alberts, associate professor of mathematics, has researched the anxiety math causes for students.

"Some students are afraid of math the way some people are afraid of spiders," Alberts said. "The math classes here at Truman would freak out the students at Moberly - we aren't designed for them, so what can we do about it, how can we help the students?"

Although Alberts' goal is to help relieve students' anxiety in math classes at any school, he and his colleagues have done their research using controlled math sections at MACC.

"At first it was me and some students measuring math anxiety, and that's what we did, but anyone at Truman is fine because of their high school classes," Alberts said. "Community college students have actual anxiety about the math. Our students are much more worried about public embarrassment."

Alberts said MACC's math classes are set up with four sections before entering college algebra for the wider distribution of the students and that many of those students are in need of basic review. Alberts has developed techniques to benefit those who suffer anxiety from math.

"Visualizing success is another part of the anxiety," Alberts said. "If you think about that anxiety when you go into the room, you are going to have that feeling of dread. The other thing we talk about is the model of striving. Most anything you think about works the same. You build up over time, which is the model of learning."

Steven Voss, associate professor of psychology, developed further techniques to overcome math anxiety. Voss said modifying Cognitive Behavior Therapy is his main focus. Cognitive Behavior Therapy involves reorganizing debilitating behaviors and learning how to replace destructive thoughts with beneficial ones.

"We are taking techniques designed for one-on-one situations and transferring them into classrooms," Voss said. "We want to find some treatment non-physiologists could implant in their classrooms that would treat math anxiety and improve the performance of the students."

Students at Truman also might carry a fear of math into the classroom environment. Sophomore Andrea Jones is taking trigonometry but said she is affected by anxiety she feels toward the subject.

"Yeah, I definitely have trouble taking tests," Jones said. "I can understand the stuff, but when it's put in front of me, I have no idea what to do or where to start."

Jones said she could try to start using a technique Voss developed such as daily journaling.

"Journaling probably would help me because then I could get all of those frustrations out, and then I could have them all out of the way so I could start my homework," Jones said. "Get it all out before I do it and then try to focus on doing it and not complaining."

Although the causes of math anxiety have not been fully determined, all three professors involved in the research recognized anxiety and the problems that occur because of its debilitating effects.

Jones said learning to work past her difficulties with math is more important than getting a good grade.

"I am really bad at math," Jones said. "I was never good with math to begin with and so the basic stuff you need to know, I am not really good at. So I can't even recognize to do that with the problems and then work my way through them. Obviously grades matter, but I just want to be able to do it."