Reduce Math Anxiety with Pretest Warm Ups
Anxiety during math exams hurts performance. Doing poorly on math exams can increase anxiety. This vicious cycle can push people away from math. How can we use a little cognitive design to change that?
A new study by psychologists at the University Chicago suggests an answer. They did brain scans of highly anxious math students and found that simple warm up tasks (doing easy math problems) distracts the brain regions generating the anxiety and improved performance on an exam. The key is to interrupt the anticipation phase when negative emotions generate a cascade that closes down our brain’s ability to do math.
Adding anxiety reducing warm-up activities is something we can easily do to improve not only test performance but learning and teaching.
