JON CRIPWELL, NATIONAL LEAD FOR PRIMARY MATHS, TWINKL, UK
I’m just not a maths person.
Many teachers will have heard this phrase from students, parents, colleagues and perhaps even themselves. It is often said lightly, but it carries a powerful message: that mathematics is a subject in which some people naturally belong and others do not. Maths anxiety is commonly understood as an emotional response to mathematical tasks, often associated with tension, avoidance and reduced performance (Ashcraft, 2002; Dowker et al., 2016). Research has shown that it can interfere with working memory, making it harder for students to hold information in mind, reason flexibly and solve problems (Finell et al., 2022). However, if we only view maths anxiety as an individual cognitive difficulty, then we risk missing an additional important component. For many students, anxiety in mathematics is also shaped by classroom culture, relationships and repeated experiences of success, failure, comparison
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