How to solve for math anxiety? Studying the causes, consequences, and prevention methods needed

Molly Jameson, PhD, is not generally an anxious person. An educational psychologist at the University of Northern Colorado, she loves to learn and solve problems. But presented with an unexpected math problem, her nerves spark. “It’s almost like white noise in my brain,” she said.

Jameson has—and studies—math anxiety, a specific form of fear that rears its head when people solve equations, take mathematics tests, or even just think about numbers. “Often people with high math anxiety know how to do the math. They’re not necessarily lacking the knowledge,” Jameson said. “It’s an overreaction to math that takes up cognitive resources in their brains and prevents them from accessing the skills and knowledge they need to solve the problem.”

That overreaction can affect people’s performance in school and work. It can hinder academic achievement, influence the college majors or jobs people choose, and interfere with daily tasks like paying bills or managing medication dosages. From planning for retirement to buying an area rug, “math is everywhere and in everything we do,” Jameson said. To make life easier for people with math anxiety, she and other psychologists are exploring how and why it develops, and how to keep it from derailing students.

Most of the skills we rely on—things like language learning, face processing, or navigation—develop whether or not we study them in school. Modern mathematics is different. After centuries of academic inquiry, math has pushed beyond the basic numeracy skills we use in everyday life, said David Geary, PhD, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri. “It’s now really an evolutionary novel, highly abstract, and difficult domain, without a lot of the built-in scaffolds that help us learn,” he said. “We’re asking kids to learn something that was just developed culturally over the last few millennia, and they have no inherent preparation to understand it.”

Another thing that makes math daunting for many kids is that it’s so objective. If you’re writing an essay or putting together a presentation, there’s wiggle room in how it’s judged. “With math, you can make a mistake and get it wrong. And that can be especially anxiety provoking,” said Colleen Ganley, PhD, a developmental and educational psychologist at Florida State University.

Feeling a bit anxious about a math exam isn’t atypical. And a little bit of nervousness could, in theory, spur people to study. But math anxiety is something bigger. For people with math anxiety, facing numerical tasks isn’t just difficult—it’s painful. In her research on math anxiety, Sian Beilock, PhD, a cognitive scientist and president of Dartmouth, and her former graduate student Ian Lyons, PhD, asked participants to solve math tasks while inside an fMRI machine. They found that in people with high math anxiety, the mere anticipation of doing math led to increased activity in brain regions associated with threat detection and the experience of pain (PLOS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 10, 2012opens in new window).

Plenty of people are feeling that pain. The prevalence varies from study to study, but the evidence suggests about 20% to 25% of kids experience moderate or high levels of math anxiety, Ganley said. And it persists into adulthood. In a study of 1,000 adults, Ganley and her colleague Sara Hart, PhD, found that math anxiety follows a normal distribution pattern, with the mean hovering being “some” and “moderate” math anxiety. It’s higher in women than in men and is correlated with both general anxiety and test anxiety (Journal of Numerical Cognition, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2019opens in new window). Despite that correlation, however, many people with math-specific anxiety don’t experience anxiety in other areas of their lives.

Math anxiety is associated with worse math achievement in school and beyond. In a meta-analysis of studies conducted from 1992 to 2018, Ganley and her colleagues found a small-to-moderate correlation between math anxiety and math achievement, starting in childhood and remaining significant through adulthood (Barroso, C., et al., Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 147, No. 2, 2021opens in new window). Her 2019 study in the Journal of Numerical Cognition also showed that people with STEM careers and those who had completed graduate school reported significantly lower levels of math anxiety compared with those with less education, suggesting people’s fear of math may hold them back from those pursuits.

Other studies support that finding. Beilock and her colleagues found that adults with math anxiety choose easier, low-reward math problems over harder, high-reward ones—a tendency that could lead them to skip advanced math classes and the career trajectories that require them (Choe, K. W., et al., Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 11, 2019opens in new window). “Math anxiety is experienced by girls and boys as early as elementary school and can lead to avoidance of everyday situations using math later in their lives, including money management and salary negotiation,” Beilock said.

[Related: How to help kids manage math anxiety]

Do poor math skills lead to anxiety, or is it the other way around? Beilock and colleagues showed that math anxiety at the beginning of first grade predicted kids’ math achievement in first through third grades, above and beyond their foundational math skills (Pantoja, N., et al., Journal of Cognition and Development, Vol. 21, No. 5, 2020opens in new window). That suggests that anxiety can interfere with future math learning. Still, evidence suggests it can happen in both directions, with anxiety preventing kids from learning, and poor skills increasing their anxiety. “It becomes a cycle,” Jameson said.

While math anxiety can appear in early elementary school, it’s common for it to emerge around middle school or junior high, as kids confront more complicated mathematical concepts. And studies show that can happen even among kids with strong math skills. In a longitudinal study, Geary followed teens in grades seven through nine. Their math anxiety tended to increase over those years for all kids, as math lessons became more difficult and increasingly abstract (Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 115, No. 5, 2023opens in new window).

As with other studies, Geary found math anxiety was higher in girls than in boys, even after controlling for general anxiety. He also found boys who made stronger gains in math achievement over the study period had lower anxiety. The same wasn’t true for girls, however. “Even when girls were excelling in math over that transition, it didn’t buffer their math anxiety,” he said.

Gender is a consistent factor in math anxiety—and that’s a clue that math anxiety may have more to do with beliefs than with skills. “Gender doesn’t play a role in math performance. Men and women, boys and girls, are equally as good at math,” Jameson said. “But there’s this societal stereotype that math is a masculine domain, and I think a lot of women incorporate that idea.”

Research backs up the idea that the way kids interpret their educational experiences is a key factor in determining who develops math anxiety. Gerardo Ramirez, PhD, an educational psychologist at Ball State University, has described how students’ internal narratives may drive math anxiety (Educational Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2018opens in new window). A child who sees a tough math assignment as a challenge that will help them learn new skills may be less likely to develop anxiety than a child who gets stuck and thinks, “I’m just not a math person.”

Jameson has also explored contextual factors related to math anxiety. In a study with second graders, she found the strongest predictor of math anxiety was math self-concept—in other words, a student’s confidence in their ability to complete a math task. Indeed, self-concept was more important than gender as a predictor of math anxiety (The Journal of Experimental Education, Vol. 82, No. 4, 2014opens in new window). And in college students, she showed that math self-concept was a more important factor in the development of math anxiety than emotional self-efficacy, a person’s belief in their ability to control their emotions (Educational Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 11, 2022opens in new window).

Unfortunately, all sorts of factors can feed into the beliefs a person has about their math abilities, including messages they receive from teachers. In 2010, Beilock and her former graduate student Marjorie Schaeffer, PhD, found that girls in classes with highly math-anxious teachers learned less math compared with girls whose teachers did not have math anxiety. A decade later, they replicated that finding in a larger sample of first graders, showing a link between teachers’ math anxiety and students’ learning in both girls and boys (Developmental Science, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2021opens in new window). “Kids learn from the adults around them,” Beilock said. “We know that when teachers are anxious about math, their students learn less math over the school year.” 

Yet while teachers’ math anxiety affects student achievement, it’s not clear whether it might also lead to math anxiety in their students, Ganley said. Some math-anxious teachers might avoid digging deeper into the subject, but others might take extra care to disguise their own anxiety in order to get kids excited about math. Those efforts can pay off, she added. “One of the best things parents and teachers can do is to try to make math a positive experience for kids.”

Researchers have tested various short interventions for math anxiety over the years, but results have been mixed. Some interventions that initially seemed promising failed to show benefits in replication studies, Ganley said. In a study of 300 college students, she tested four brief interventions that had shown promise in previous experiments. Two guided students to reappraise their math anxiety in a more positive light, either reframing the task with excitement or as a challenge. One involved expressive writing before the task, giving students a chance to offload their worries to free up cognitive resources. The fourth gave students time to read over the test before taking it, the idea being that students would be able to activate the cognitive resources needed to complete the task and devote less of their working memory to their worried thoughts. But none of the interventions lowered students’ self-reported anxiety or improved their performance on the tests (Journal of Numerical Cognition, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2021opens in new window).

Brief interventions might not be the best way to manage students’ math anxiety, Ganley said. In a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), she’s developing an eight-session school-based intervention that draws on principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. Other researchers are coming at the challenge from the teacher’s side. Research has shown that elementary education students have the highest math anxiety levels of all college majors (Hembree, R., Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1990opens in new window). Jameson hopes to reduce teachers’ anxiety before they step in to the classroom.

Jameson’s NSF-funded intervention aims to change math attitudes of preservice elementary teachers by helping them develop self-regulatory skills to better manage anxious thoughts and behaviors. “We want to help teachers become more confident so that once they get into the classroom, they aren’t modeling negative math attitudes,” she said. Those attitudes are often subtle, she added. An offhand comment like, “Let’s put away our math books now and do something fun,” sends the message that math is anything but.

While some researchers are focused on the anxiety piece, others say they should turn their attention to the math. “The only way to address math anxiety is to fix math,” said Patricia Stokes, PhD, a psychologist who studies problem solving at Barnard College.

Stokes got into math accidentally when she was invited to submit a grant for research on problem-solving in early math education. When she began looking into existing curricula, she said, she found a jumble of lessons: Some addition here, shapes and geometry there, some subtraction thrown in. What was lacking, she believed, was deliberate practice, teaching young students basic mathematical models and building on those models steadily and incrementally. “Just as painters think in color and form, mathematicians think in numbers, symbols, and patterns,” she said. She worked with a mathematician to create an immersive curriculum that teaches kids to think like mathematicians.

In a pilot test, she found 71% of kids in the program scored above grade level, compared with 30% of a classroom that used the traditional curriculum. Expanding the program to four more elementary schools, she again found kids gained advanced math skills. What’s more, 86% reported that they liked math (Mathematics Teaching Research Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020opens in new window).

Stokes argues that teaching kids to think like mathematicians will give them the confidence and skills to succeed, without anxiety, as their math classes get more complicated. Without longitudinal studies, of course, that’s still a guess. But others agree that improving math learning is an important piece of the puzzle. “The best preventive for math anxiety is to develop solid basic math skills,” Geary said.

Teachers and families can also ease anxiety around math by improving other types of learning. One thing that helps is improving study skills, Beilock said. “Our research has shown that math anxiety can lead a student to avoid studying the toughest math problems, which impacts their performance on a test. Now, they’re less prepared for the test and they’re still anxious,” she said. “We can teach them better study habits and help them confront the problems that are making them feel anxious.”

Educators and caregivers can also help children approach learning—including mathematics learning—with a growth mindset. Ganley’s team found students with fixed mindsets had lower math achievement. But students who had a more “mixed” mindset, believing that math intelligence could grow—but that growth happened at different times for different people—tended to have higher math achievement (Barroso, C., Contemporary Educational Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 1, 2023opens in new window). “A lot of people think that math skills are something you have, or you don’t have,” Jameson added. “But anybody can learn math.”

Those lessons, however, are best taught early. Mathematics learning is cumulative, with one lesson building on another. The foundational skills children need to successfully learn mathematics begin in preschool, Geary has found (Psychological Science, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2018opens in new window). And older children who are too anxious to study math may fall behind. “Most kids don’t particularly like practicing math, but it’s important to develop a solid foundation from the beginning,” Geary said.

Math education is a hot-button issue for schools, parents, and politicians—especially post-pandemic. In 2023, math scores of 13-year-olds taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell 9 points, the largest drop in half a century. Against that worrisome backdrop, math remains big business: Pre-K–12 textbooks and educational materials brought in more than $5.6 billion in 2022, according to the Association of American Publishers. While textbook publishers vie to produce the next hot math curriculum, and departments of education scramble to adopt them, there’s also an entire academic field of math education experts studying better ways to teach the subject.

Yet there is room for psychologists in that crowded space, said Pooja Sidney, PhD, a developmental cognitive psychologist who studies math attitudes at the University of Kentucky. Psychologists and education researchers can work together to make learning numbers both more effective and less stressful. However, that collaboration may not come naturally. “There are some big theoretical divides between people in math education and people who work in the psychology of math cognition. Those can be big barriers to overcome,” Sidney said. “But if we want to make change, we have to bring together all these pieces.”

Even for psychological scientists who don’t work with children or study education, math anxiety is an important phenomenon to keep in mind, she added. Sidney studies both math anxiety and health decision-making, and the former has clear impacts on the latter. Math anxiety can affect how patients process information in a doctor’s office or make sense of health statistics, for example. It’s something to consider for anyone trying to communicate numerical information to the public. It’s also a factor for researchers who ask study participants to deal with numbers of any kind.

“Most researchers aren’t thinking about math anxiety, but it affects people’s performance whenever you’re measuring anything numerical,” Sidney said. “Any time you’re dealing with numbers in your research, you’ll have an effect of math anxiety.”

Still, the biggest impacts of math anxiety will always be on the kids and adults who live with it. For them, the fear of numbers can guide their choices in school, work, and everyday life. Whether by improving math education, specifically targeting math anxiety, or both, it’s clear there’s a need for better support, Sidney said. “For people who don’t have it, it can be strange to imagine someone being so scared of mathematics,” she added. “But a child with math anxiety can’t just get over it because an adult tells them math is easy.”