Maths Anxiety and Exam Results

What anxiety actually takes away

Ashcraft and Kirk showed in 2001 that maths anxiety disrupts performance by consuming working memory — the limited space that holds a number you are carrying, a bracket you have not yet expanded, or the second half of a word problem while you deal with the first. Worry is itself a task, and it runs in the same space.

This explains something parents find genuinely baffling: a child who can do a topic at the kitchen table and cannot do it in a test has not forgotten it. The knowledge is intact. The space it needed in order to be used was occupied by something else.

Where it shows in a marked paper

These are patterns we see in students' scripts rather than research findings, and no single one of them is proof. Two papers showing the same shape are worth acting on.

• Blank starts on questions the student can demonstrably do — the first line never gets written.
• Working that stops rather than goes wrong: one line, then abandonment.
• Arithmetic slips clustered in the long questions instead of spread evenly across the paper.
• A large gap between homework accuracy and test accuracy on the same topic inside the same fortnight.

The finding parents find uncomfortable

Maloney and colleagues followed first- and second-graders across a school year in 2015. Children of more maths-anxious parents learned less maths over the year and had more maths anxiety by the end — but only where those parents reported helping frequently with maths homework. Where anxious parents helped less often, there was no such relationship. The parents' own maths knowledge did not predict the outcome.

The useful reading of this is not 'stop helping'. It is that something other than mathematics is being transmitted during the helping. So change what you help with: organisation, materials, getting started, checking against an answer key. Leave the method to the teacher, a textbook or a video.

And retire the line 'I was terrible at maths too'. It is offered as comfort. It is received as an explanation for why the child cannot do it.

What actually reduces it

The theme is the same throughout: take load off working memory, and make the physical experience of a timed maths test ordinary rather than novel.

• Over-learn arithmetic to genuine fluency, so the space anxiety is taking is not also needed for 7 × 8.
• Practise under a clock in low-stakes conditions, often, so the physical response stops being an event.
• Rehearse a first move for each question type — write the formula, label the diagram, state what is being asked — so a blank moment has a script.
• Rehearse a re-entry: skip it, mark it, come back. Most exam collapses are one stuck question that was not left.
• Remove time pressure first and build accuracy, then add the clock back. In that order, not simultaneously.

The limit of what a tutor can do

We teach mathematics. We can change the difficulty, the pace, the fluency and the exam rehearsal, and for a large number of anxious students that is enough, because their anxiety is a reasonable response to sitting papers they were not ready for.

We cannot treat an anxiety disorder and we do not pretend to. Where a student is in real distress, the school's pastoral lead or a professional is the right route, and we would rather say that in the second week than in the second term.