Math Anxiety and its Implication

                                                                                         

What is Math Anxiety? There are many definitions to this, but to keep things simple, I would define it as an unpleasant emotional feeling within a person that will inhibit process or learning. It exists in everyone but differs in the extent and how it is controlled.

Why is the anxiety in math stronger than other subject? It may be due to the fact that the answer to a math question is discrete in nature. It is either correct or incorrect; a straight exposure to weakness or strength in that subject. This is not so for others, like English, where the answer is subjective and does not reflect a direct incorrect answer.

This math anxiety causes a person to fear math, since the guilt of failing to solve a math question causes him to loss his confidence. He may feel left out by others. This feeling spirals and further reduces his chance of succeeding with math. With worsen math performance, his attitude towards math deteriorates and may reach a stage where he cannot performs.

This anxiety would therefore hinder learning and leaves him helpless, fearful and lost. To him there is no more fun in math. What will he do next? Avoid math!

Math avoidance is a dangerous situation and it will show its ugly face when the person moves on in life. He may lose out during job application, for example. With increasing standard of the job market, avoiding math is detrimental. Math is seen by many as the ability to think logically to solve a given problem and this is the skill necessary to do any job well.

To avoid math due to math anxiety has further negative effect. It causes fear in any topics related to math, be it quality control studies (need for handling raw data), computer programming (manipulation of numbers by software) or simple technical drawing of shapes (geometry dimensioning).

Therefore to conclude, even though math is different from other subject, it can be fun and interesting if failure can be accepted as part of learning. This will turn the fearful math anxiety into constructive learning.

To learn more about math, you may like to visit the site indicated below.

About the author:
Lim EeHai is the webmaster of site http://www.limeehai.com entitled Principle of Mathematics.

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