Inquiry Reflectionf

 

This inquiry project taught me a lot, and I think that it was valuable. Prior to digging into the academic research and speaking with such a wide variety of people, I had some preconceptions about math anxiety and an unfortunate self-assured confidence in my conclusions. Some of my preconceptions were validated, but most of them didn’t quite turn out to align with what I found in the research. For example, the research about how significantly anxiety can affect learning was very unsurprising. I do think it’s important to look into things that we assume are true, but that wasn’t the true value of this inquiry topic for me. I think the thing that shifted my thinking the most were having personal conversations with Teacher Candidates (and teachers), and one particular point stood out to me about how students who are anxious about math don’t appreciate being told that everyone is a math person. I was surprised by how frequently this came up, and how widespread it seems to be.

I hope to carry forward with this topic in my Inquiry II class. My initial thought was to cover all aspects of Math Anxiety in Inquiry I, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be possible given the time available to present and to collect information. I decided to break it up into Causes of Math Anxiety (Inquiry I) and Strategies to Reduce Math Anxiety in the Classroom (Inquiry II). In addition to that, I think my curiosity has led me to consider what structural changes could be made to reduce math anxiety in our students and make the subject more accessible to all learners. This ties in with my “Everest Statement” from EPSE 308 about being a math teacher for all students, not just the ones who enjoy math.

SLIDES

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CaHyZZipkXPZgD6xqkoG6pPkkpUabs6lR-MaE6XvugE/edit?usp=sharing

Real World Connections

I've connected this with the real world by having many conversations with TCs from other cohorts, and by speaking with the students that I tutor. I've also been having conversations with the teachers at my practicum school, both in the math department and in other areas. This was one of the things that lead me to being invited into Social Justice 12 as a guest speaker. I've heard so many stories, and so many people have told me that this is an important topic, and shared their own experiences of feeling anxiety in math class. In class, I'm going to have the class fill out a survey/discussion question about their own experiences. The goal is to have the other TCs reflect on their own experiences and how many of their students might feel very differently and how that this is legitimate.

Annotated Bibliography

Mehmet, C., & Hulya, S. (2021). Factors that cause students to develop math anxiety and strategies to diminish. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 16(4), 1356–1367. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v16i4.5984

This article breaks down causes into three groups: student-related, teacher-related and parent-related. It includes example quotations from the teachers who participated. The research is qualitative in nature and was analyzed for reliability using a formula that considered the ratio between consensus answers and all answers.

Ramirez, G., Shaw, S. T., & Maloney, E. A. (2018). Math anxiety: Past research, promising interventions, and a new interpretation framework. Educational Psychologist, 53(3), 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1447384

This article compares two different frameworks: Disruption Account and Reduced Competency Account. The Disruption Account is oriented around the idea that anxiety prevents students from using their full intelligence, while the Reduced Competency Account is based on the idea that students develop anxiety because they have lower basal competency, and then this forms an unfortunate spiral. This was an excellent, widely-cited article that introduces a third framework (Interpretation Account).

Harper, N. W., & Daane, C. J. (1998). Causes and reduction of math anxiety in Preservice Elementary Teachers. Action in Teacher Education, 19(4), 29–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.1998.10462889

Because the previous article that I read brought up elementary school teachers as a significant cause of math anxiety, I decided to narrow down on this. I was surprised that research on this topic had been conducted as far back as the early 1950’s. This article lays things out very differently, and does discuss specific pedagogical practices that cause anxiety in students. It also analyzes the impact of anxiety on math teaching instead of just on the students learning, which was a valuable perspective.

Gill, G. K., & Dykeman, C. (2019). Preservice Elementary School Teachers’ Math Anxiety and Worst Experiences as Students in Math Class. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3327922

This was not a published, academic article but is a preprint. I stumbled upon it almost by chance, and decided to include it because it explicitly linked math trauma to math anxiety, and really aligned with many conversations that I’ve had with math-anxious adults. The paper summarizes overt and covert traumatic experiences with math, and I had never encountered that framework before. I think that this is also meaningful to keep in mind in a context of neurodivergence and teaching autistic students. It also highlights the common theme of embarrassment. However, it doesn’t critically analyze Boyd’s analysis of American teachers having higher rates of math anxiety than non-American teachers.

Johnson, C. E. (2006). Attitude or anxiety: Mathematics disposition of high school algebra I students (Doctoral dissertation, Wichita State University, College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction).

This is a thesis from an MEd student. The very first thing that stood out to me was that the proposed intervention did not elicit the results that author expected. This was very fascinating, and made me think about how other common interventions might actually be exacerbating anxiety. An effort-focused approach jumped to my mind, but I wasn’t able to find any research into this - perhaps a guiding question for Inquiry III in the summer. Since I’m leaving the topic of test anxiety to a classmate, I mostly used this source for background and for its excellent description of the MARS-A scale and how it differentiates between numeracy anxiety and test anxiety. This also just seemed very relatable and relevant, as it wasn’t an academic publication. The point about how anxiety presents as anger and frustration rang very true, especially for teenage boys. The author assumed that confidence was the cure to anxiety and I think that this erroneous assumption raises a lot of very valuable questions. It also included a discussion of Math Autobiographies, which is a topic that I became intensely interested in about 5 years ago.

Why do people get so anxious about math? (2017). Youtube. Retrieved November 9, 2025, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7snnRaC4t5c.

This video did present key information quickly, despite its irritating presentation. It did raise the point about the correlation between being perceived as being good at math and being perceived as intelligent.

Student, A. (2014, April 29). Mathematical Autobiography. Art of Mathematics. https://www.artofmathematics.org/sites/default/files/blog-posts/math_autobio_sample.pdf

I included this because I think it’s important to discuss first-hand accounts written by teenagers about their own experiences with math anxiety. I think that this student was quite honest about their experiences (at least until the final paragraph) and I consider this an example of why it’s important not to talk about students negatively or argue that they actually enjoy math.

Starling‐Alves, I., Wronski, M. R., & Hubbard, E. M. (2021). Math anxiety differentially impairs symbolic, but not nonsymbolic, fraction skills across development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1509(1), 113–129. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14715 

This didn’t really fit in with my big-picture plan for this inquiry project, but it was so interesting that I want to find a way to tie it in. I do think that it can be relevant in a high school context because fractions are included in the Math 8 curriculum and I think many students continue to find them challenging. For example, I’ve noticed many students who can factor whole-number trinomials but cannot factor simple examples that include recognizable fractions. The article introduced me to a concept called “whole number bias” and I immediately recognized this in my students. It also makes a good point that adults experience this anxiety as well, and that math anxiety doesn’t disappear at the end of childhood. It explains that the reduction in working memory caused by anxiety strongly impacts symbolic calculation but not intuitive reasoning.

November 13 Exit Slip

I was more productive in class today than last week, but still didn't get as much done as I'd like. Fortunately, I'm very interested in this topic and that motivates me to work on it outside of class time without it feeling like a total slog. I did find a very interesting article about fraction anxiety with some strong results that tie in with working memory and the Disruption Account. I also had a valuable conversation about Susan to check in whether I was on the right track. I wasn't able to find the specific pieces that she was referencing, but I did find examples of other mathematicians who had initially struggled with calculation. I feel that I'm in a good place with this inquiry project.

Combination blog post: Inquiry and November 6 Exit

My thoughts about my Inquiry project have changed a bit because of the short practicum and a discussion in my EPSE 308 seminar. Initially, I was approaching this from an accessibility point of view, or wanting to discuss the stress caused by exams. Now, I have a much clearer idea of what I'm actually interested in focusing on. While assessment anxiety is an important topic, I feel that we've had many valuable discussions about this in Kevin's class and wanted to focus on something else for this class. I also realized that I may have been overly ambitious in my original scope, so narrowed it down to just looking at the causes and origins of math anxiety.

I chose to spend the majority of my work-time socializing with my classmates and to work independently once I got home. I also don't have a charger for my computer and need it to last until Saturday, so I feel that this wasn't actually a terrible decision. Now that I'm home, I've been much more productive on Google Scholar than I was in class. This is my first time specifically using this engine. I remember searching for studies on teaching fractions during my undergraduate degree, but using ERIC. My initial search was just for "Math Anxiety" and a lot of overview type articles appeared. I think that I am going to need to eventually use some of these, so I made a document to paste them in as potential ways to introduce my presentation. Some of them had thousands of citations. Things got much more focused once I started to play around with keywords, such as causes, high school, calculus and geometry. Many of them are very recent, and it's exciting to see that this is a field of research that's actively in development. The biggest issue that I'm running into at the moment is getting interested and sucked into reading articles.

Exit Slip October 16

I was very glad that we were offered a "Choose Your Own Adventure" activity for our class. While I do have some memories of geometric constructions from other courses and learning that I've done, it's really not an area of study that I find particularly engaging. I was much happier to have the opportunity to do something with words and form, and other than a brief regrettable interlude, this was a positive experience with my classmates. The PH4 poems even came up in discussion when we met with our Faculty Advisors and was a way to connect with the Teacher Candidates from the English cohort, who initially thought I was joking when I brought up the fact that we were doing poetry in the Math/Physics inquiry class. I still personally enjoyed the Fibonacci poetry a bit more than the PH4, but I would definitely be open to trying out more of these forms in the future.