How to help students overcome math anxiety
Math anxiety can significantly affect students’ ability to understand and engage with the subject, as it often stems from negative perceptions and experiences. When students internalize these attitudes, they may struggle to see math as approachable or valuable.
The price of fearing math instruction is high. Over the past decade, well-paying jobs with substantial math and science demands have increased. To help students overcome math anxiety, educators must first identify its root causes and apply effective strategies to address it.
What is math anxiety and what causes it?
Math anxiety refers to the intense stress or fear that some people feel when dealing with math-related tasks, whether solving problems, taking exams, or thinking about numbers. The causes of math anxiety boil down to the pressure felt when experiencing one or more of these symptoms.
Math anxiety can affect kids as early as elementary or middle school when math content difficulty increases. Between 20 and 25 percent of students are impacted by some math anxiety.
When students don’t consistently engage with instruction, trying to learn new math concepts can feel like learning a new language. Early childhood education places a strong emphasis on literacy, which often leads to children developing reading skills before they fully grasp mathematical concepts.
Unsurprisingly, anxiety and math performance are correlated. To help students feel more comfortable and engaged with math material, we need to hook them at the start of every grade, unit, and lesson topic. Knowing what causes math anxiety is one thing; finding tools that address how to overcome math anxiety is another.
How Flocabulary can help reduce math anxiety
Unsure about how to reduce math anxiety in the classroom? Flocabulary can help! Flocabulary’s video-based lessons bring the curriculum to life using hip-hop music and storytelling to captivate students and make the learning experience memorable and interesting. We offer hundreds of engaging math lessons for K-12 students that teach math skills and topic-specific vocabulary, from addition and subtraction to statistics and probability.
Designed to engage students, including those who may feel disconnected from traditional instruction, Flocabulary makes math more accessible. If you are looking for support to help students with math anxiety, Flocabulary can help. Our video lessons introduce students to relevant math terms in context. Each lesson includes a suite of instructional activities that provides multiple exposure to mathematical vocabulary and background knowledge.
Watch our video about How to Find Area and Perimeter to check out the type of engaging videos you can expect to find on Flocabulary. Explore the full lesson and supporting activities here.
With the understanding of what causes math anxiety and how Flocabulary can help in mind, let’s explore what actional strategies can meaningfully impact students.
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.
How to help students overcome math anxiety
1. Avoid negative talk
Kids are sponges, which means that students who are exposed to stereotypes about math risk internalizing them and creating self-fulfilling prophecies about their own abilities. Educators can push back on this negative exposure by encouraging and modeling how to replace negative thoughts with positive self-talk.
For example, if you hear a student say, “I’m terrible at math,” you can course correct them by reminding them that improvement is possible with commitment. Or, if you as the teacher make a mistake during instruction, you can create a group learning opportunity by explaining to your class that everyone makes mistakes (even teachers!).
Neuroscience tells us that students need to develop personal and emotional connections for learning to take place. Without these connections, students may be more likely to fall into the trap of negative self-talk. Flocabulary lessons can help create connections and positive math experiences by combining storytelling, humor, and catchy lyrics to authentically engage students with the curriculum.
Additionally, the inclusive characters featured in Flocabulary videos let students see themselves in what they’re learning while also getting to know those who are different from them. Giving students the opportunity to hear, see, and connect with math presented in affirming and enthusiastic ways across multiple contexts can help them when overcoming math anxiety.
2. Improve study skills
Building consistent practice skills before introducing a new topic or ahead of an exam is a great way to prime students for the math vocabulary they’ll be exposed to. Math is cumulative, which means that when students master basic math skills, they’ll become more prepared to learn more rigorous material.
Students can develop math anxiety if they haven’t mastered foundational skills, which may lead to them avoiding studying, and thus becoming cyclically less prepared for classroom instruction and assessments. When teachers model the practice of studying consistently and students buy in, they can decrease anxiety for bigger math events, like a project or test.
There are many ways you can incorporate Flocabulary into your study routines, such as setting aside time to watch the lessons that are relevant to your classroom instruction. Use Flocabulary’s Playlists feature to easily curate a set of Flocabulary videos to support an entire instructional unit and to extend learning by playing your students’ favorite songs throughout the school day.
3. Insert fun into assignments
Engaging and enjoyable activities can help lower the stress levels associated with math. When students are having fun, they are less likely to feel anxious and more likely to participate actively. Try personalizing word problems to include your students’ names or curating sets of real-world problems for practice. This can help students connect with the practical use cases for math.
When you capture students’ attention, it can make them more willing to engage with the material and can lead to better understanding and retention of math concepts. Putting more effort into customizing your lessons to add elements of fun is also a great confidence booster. When students see that they can succeed in fun math activities, they’ll start to believe in their abilities.
Flocabulary can provide your classroom with a memorable and enjoyable experience by extending vocabulary instruction beyond memorization and engaging students in authentic ways across the lesson sequence. During whole-class instruction, this can look like a teacher projecting the video lesson from the front of the classroom and students singing the lyrics and dancing to the music.
After students begin to internalize the math concepts in the catchy rhymes, they can explore the accompanying suite of instructional activities included in every lesson. These activities test word knowledge in a variety of ways, from quick checks for understanding in the Vocab Game to citing text evidence from the video lesson in Break It Down.
4. Celebrate all types of math success
There’s nothing too small to celebrate when it comes to a student’s math success. When a student aces a test, congratulate them on their performance and focus praise on the consistency and effort the student placed on studying. For smaller feats like answering a question correctly (or even incorrectly) during whole-class instruction, consider focusing praise on their effort rather than their achievement.
Every Flocabulary lesson includes a Lyric Lab activity for students to demonstrate and reflect on the math vocabulary they’ve mastered, laying the foundation for deeper math mastery. As the last activity in the lesson sequence, the goal of Lyric Lab is to incorporate all vocabulary learned from the lesson into an original rhyme.
Students can practice rapping their lyrics over a beat with the built-in rhyming dictionary and beats library. This activity supports the Create level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, where students combine their new knowledge and skills to create something new in a unique way.
Once the writing is done, the true celebration of student math mastery can begin. Lyrics created in Lyric Lab are downloadable for students to reference as they perform their new song for their small group or whole class, giving everyone a chance to join in the celebration!
5. Promote a growth mindset and mental health
Overcoming math anxiety is no easy feat. Students who are struggling with how to overcome math anxiety can feel like their negative feelings will last forever. Anxiety from other experiences can contribute to developing a fixed mindset about math abilities.
Helping students develop a growth mindset in math can include verbally rewarding them for having a determined attitude and putting effort into studying math. Students who feel understood and see a path to competency ahead will be more likely to feel like they can conquer their math anxiety.
Flocabulary provides lessons that directly support developing a growth mindset and offers a slew of other lessons that promote managing mental health. From the Lessons library, navigate to the Life Skills section to find topics related to social and emotional learning and health and wellness. The connection between these topics and math performance is clear: When their well-being is addressed, students can more clearly focus on the academic tasks at hand.
Start helping students overcome math anxiety with Flocabulary
Overcoming math anxiety is crucial for students’ unlocking their full potential, not just in mathematics but beyond. When educators understand how to help students with math anxiety and create a supportive learning environment, students are more likely to succeed. Understanding the root of the issue and implementing strategies such as positive self-talk, consistent study habits, and engaging instructional tools such as Flocabulary can help.
When the understanding of how to reduce math anxiety in the classroom is paired with strategic efforts, we can transform math from a source of fear into a subject of confidence and curiosity, preparing students for success in their academic and everyday lives.
New to Flocabulary? Teachers can sign up for a trial to access our lesson videos and assessment activities. Administrators can get in touch with us to learn more about unlocking the full power of Flocabulary through Flocabulary Plus.