Reducing Math Negativity

Joy and enthusiasm are prominent components in building a positive and enduring response to success in math. Through neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience research we find supportive correlations between students’ math negativity and stress responses that impact their learning and perseverance relating to mathematics. This article will suggest interventions to promote positive attitudes about math.

For most children, the biggest school fear is making a mistake in front of classmates. Help reduce mistake fear and increase your students’ positive participation experiences with activities where errors are part of the process.       

Start With Estimation

You can help reduce mistake fear and increase students’ engagement with low-risk opportunities to estimate, and then revise estimations. Students often don’t take the time to estimate or check their answers, because their goal is to finish quickly and get the single correct answer. Reduce mistake fear by encouraging estimation from a young age and throughout their math years, and you’ll stimulate their interest and participation comfort.

More than–less than is an activity that builds number sense and a positive attitude about the value of estimating. Have students work in pairs or small groups. Give each group two boxes or cans of food that weigh 8 ounces and 16 ounces. Each student can hold the can/box as they read the weight label or hear you say their weights.

Then, give them other items with the weight covered by tape or a sticky note. With the goal of making increasingly accurate estimations, they compare the feel of the new items with the feel of the 8- and 16-ounce samples. Have them first predict and verbalize if the new item’s weight is closer to 8 or 16 ounces and why. They might say, “It is a little heavier than the 8-ounce can” or “It is much lighter than the 16-ounce can, but not as light as the 8-ounce can.” As they become more successful, encourage students to predict a more specific weight for items between 8 and 16 ounces. They can then check the outcome, revise, and repeat.

Students will build number sense by experiencing the relationships between numbers and real measurements as they develop concepts of more than and less than. With time, they become more comfortable with estimation where mistakes are part of building accuracy.

Encourage Movement

From preschool through middle school, a roll of butcher-block paper turns math into physical activity, boosting understanding and memory. These multisensory, active experiences can build skills from simple addition to subtracting negative numbers.

Create a butcher-paper number line that you can roll out on the floor, or use masking tape for a more permanent line. Demonstrate walking and counting aloud as you step forward along the line from 0 to 5. Have students do the same as they write or put sticky notes on the squares with the numbers they count.

Progress as appropriate to students using the numbered line to do an even or odd number walk or jump as they count by 2s or 3s. Older children can use line walks to add numbers, such as starting on number 4 and taking 3 more steps to discover that they are on number 7. As they build experience, encourage them to use the word add and progress to writing their results in number sentences: “I was on number 7, added 3 more, and was on number 10.”

It won’t be long before they become curious or start experimenting with walking down to the bottom part of the number line below zero, where you’ve made boxes without labels that they can add as sticky notes. In doing so, they will do more than memorize flash cards for subtraction. Their brains will construct the concept of subtraction that will later be the basis for their comfort with negative numbers.

Playful and Verbal Problem-Solving

Problem-solving play, especially linked to personally relevant goals and interests of your students, can boost math positivity. These can include collaborating in small groups to solve math puzzles, such as constructing building block bridges that support increasing loads. If students are studying names of angles (acute, right, etc.), they could work in small groups to create physical representations of these angles. They could use their bodies or classroom furniture.

Bring verbal skills and the memory power of narratives by having students create stories to bring word problems to life.

Enlist Parents to Support Perseverance

All students have the potential to achieve success in math if they believe that their perseverance can make them better. You can reduce your students’ reaction to parental negative influences by informing parents in conferences or math night meetings of the power they have to impact their children’s math success and perseverance.

Parents can then be guided to avoid focusing on math stereotypes, their own math failures, or how they didn’t need math to achieve their success.

The following are big ones to avoid:

“I’ve always been bad at math,” which children often interpret as something they inherit.

“Math is not that important in most careers” or “I did quite well without math and so will you.”

“I don’t know why you are having problems. I had no trouble adding fractions with different denominators. It is quite easy. You just need to pay better attention and do extra practice.”

Students can feel like they’re letting their parents down if they struggle and may hesitate to ask for help even when it’s quite appropriate to do so. The outcome can be falling further behind, not because of laziness or lacking brainpower, but because they lose confidence that their efforts will make any difference. Instead, parents can use affirming language rooted in their own experiences to show their children that challenges with math are common and can be overcome. For example, “When I learned percentages, I thought the problems were too hard and not useful enough to put in the work. It wasn’t until I was older and buying things on credit or evaluating how much a 10 percent discount would really mean (when trying to convince my parents that something I wanted was a great value with the discount) that I realized how knowing percentages would be so useful for me. To this day, when figuring out how much to tip a delivery person or waiter, I am thankful that I can use percentages to find my answer.”

Students Can See Math As a Valuable Tool

With help in building positive emotional connections to math, your students will go from captives of math negativity to captains of their math minds. Their math brains can change from passive receptacles—barely holding on to isolated pockets of fading rote memories of isolated facts—into active constructors of transferable math concepts. Math then becomes an increasingly powerful and valued tool as students become ready to take on new challenges.