The 0Maths blog

Maths anxiety

0Maths has broad appeal but at it's heart is helping to overcome maths anxiety:

• Low commitment to an answer.
• Typed answers that aren't wrong, but perhaps aren't yet right. A lot of anxiety about maths is about getting wrong answers - we take that straight off the table.
• No ticking bomb stressors, like head to head competition or races. Maths anxious children already have elevated stress levels, and increasing them further can make learning almost impossible.
• Learners can skip back to the foundational topics for a given question.
• Scaffolding - supporting the route from what they know to what they don't.
• Visual back up. Questions posed in unfamiliar symbols can be daunting because they are difficult to grasp intuitively. By having an illustration where practical, learners have a 'real world' reference.
• Learners are in full control of the difficulty level - if they want to back up and make it easier, they can do. Some children need to spend a long time rebuilding confidence this way. They can dip their toe into a harder level, and retreat if they don't feel ready.

Once a pupil has tipped into the panic zone, their brain is flooded with adrenaline and they can not do tasks requiring logical thinking. For this reason, most tasks start off at the easiest level (ie in the comfort zone) by default and pupils should increase the difficulty level until it suits them. For confident students, there is a checkbox in settings to align the difficulty level with the target difficulty level by default.

In the growth zone diagram above, the pupil with the smaller growth zone is labelled mildly anxious. In severe cases of anxiety, the growth zone may be effectively non-existant. All that can be done is to expand the comfort zone by working within it.