4 Activities to Foster a Positive Math Identity

Learning math is a deeply cognitive experience. But the strength of that learning is highly influenced by emotions. The brain systems we aim to recruit in education—attention, motivation, memory, and more—are all driven by emotion. At times, we might wish we could wave a magic wand to dispel emotions like fear, frustration, and boredom. But that same wand would eliminate emotions that enhance learning—curiosity, confidence, and joy.

After over 25 years of teaching and studying how the brain learns, I can confidently say: A student’s emotional relationship with math is foundational to their cognitive relationship with math. As I explore in my book Building a Positive Math Identity: A Brain Science Approach, how a student feels about math, and how they see themselves with math—their math identity—has a greater impact on their math achievement than most of our curricular choices.

Here are four powerful activities to boost your students’ math achievement by fostering a positive math identity. These activities are most commonly used in middle school but have been modified by teachers across the K–12 spectrum.

Activities that Build Math Identity

1. Mathland. Students walk into your classroom with a lifetime of “emotional baggage” from their previous experiences with math. These emotions don’t get locked up in their locker or hung up neatly on the backpack hooks. They are part of the student’s math identity and follow them like a shadow. Here is a simple 10-minute activity that will give you insights into your students’ relationship with math:

Invite students to draw a place called Mathland—a world ruled by math—and place themselves in it. It could be a faraway planet with nonhuman species or a hidden civilization somewhere on earth. Give students full creative license to draw up their vision of this place where math rules everything. Their artwork will reveal their relationship with math, often more clearly than words can. This can be the starting point of future conversations with each student as you journey with them through their own emotional landscape of Mathland.

While a few students draw Mathland as a place filled with flowers, sunshine, and perfect symmetry, many pictures depict Mathland as a dark and dreary forest where people get lost, or a torture chamber for students to suffer. Knowing how students perceive math helps me know what beliefs to reinforce or debunk with my students.

2. Belonging bios. Nearly every Hollywood teen movie reinforces the biological desire to fit in or belong. What the movie industry doesn’t highlight is the surge of cortisol (and resulting chronic stress) released in the brain when people feel like they don’t belong. Identifying as “not a math person” can lead to unhealthy levels of cortisol that stifle the learning centers of the brain. This can lead to a devastating cycle of reinforcing beliefs about one’s math identity.

Creating a classroom culture where all students feel part of the math “in crowd” will lift all students emotionally and cognitively. Students must be able to look to their future and see themselves (and people like them) being successful with math. This doesn’t mean every student has to pursue a math-centered field. It means that when they look forward, there are no locked doors for them based on who they are.

Introduce students to a variety of folks engaged in careers or activities that are of interest to them. These people should share various identity markers with your students so that when your students learn about them, they might say, “Hey, they are just like me!” That is the value of representational belonging—students feel part of the in crowd with mathematics. It is a place where they can see themselves. A place where they feel like they belong. Student favorites have included learning about an intern at NASA from Mexico combining her math and fashion skills to design the next-generation space suit, and learning about a 12-year-old Black boy who proved a new divisibility rule.

3. Math media moment. The media is overflowing with messages about who is good at math and what it means to be good at math. When mainstream media portrays socially stilted “math people” wearing pocket protecters, it’s no wonder that students aren’t eager to profess their passion for math. These (sometimes) subtle messages are absorbed unconsciously in the brain and contribute to students’ belief about themselves and math.

Math media moment is an invitation to spend a few minutes a week unpacking one of these messages from the media. Show students an advertisement portraying math as hard, a movie clip showing only nerds being good at math, or an interview with a celebrity sharing their disdain for math. I’ve led conversations with students after watching a two-minute clip of the original Mean Girls movie where students identified math messages related to gender, race, popularity, beauty, “smartness,” and more. Confronting and rewiring these messages is a powerful strategy to fostering a positive math identity.

4. Math gremlins. It is normal to experience frustration when engaging with math—or anything complex with which we are not familiar. That is part of the human experience. When frustration, anxiety, or hopelessness become a student’s dominant experience, it can impact their identity.

If a student has a history of feeling anxious or frustrated in math class, it will be easier for them to slip into that neurological state with little nudging. The neurological states that students are in most frequently (confident, curious, anxious, hopeless) with math will undoubtedly shape their identity.

When students are in a neurobiological state of feeling anxious while doing math, the learning centers of the brain needed to engage in meaningful thinking and learning are blocked. To confront this math anxiety, students can draw their math gremlin (or math villain)—the pesky creature that sits on their shoulder whispering unhelpful messages to them: “You’re slower than everyone else” or “You aren’t solving that the same way as everyone else.” It can be helpful to quickly show images of the most popular villains for their age group.

By drawing their math gremlin, students are externalizing these unhelpful messages instead of internalizing them as part of their identity. Students are invited to talk back to their math gremlin with a powerful affirmation to combat its demeaning messages.

These four activities align with the brain’s four main variables that construct one’s math identity: Mathland explores past experiences with math; belonging bios help students develop their future vision of self in math spaces; math media moments provide sociocultural reflections of who is good at math and what it means to be a “math person”; and math gremlins build personal efficacy, or one’s level of confidence and competence with math.