My broadest educational goals are
Okay! So with that said, let's talk about
Students with math LD can struggle not just academically, but also emotionally. They can develop math anxiety because general education math classes do not meet their needs, and so they consistently underperform. And because math education begins early, math anxiety can also begin early and stay with you for the rest of your life. In his article on math LD in Child Neuropsychology: Concepts, Theory, and Practice, Brian Butterworth included interviews with 9-year-olds with math LD about their experiences in math class:
Child 5: It makes me feel left out, sometimes.
Child 2: Yeah.
Child 5: When I like—when I don’t know something, I wish that I was like a clever person and I blame it on myself—
Child 4: I could cry and wish I was at home with my mum and it would be—I won’t have to do any maths.
And while math anxiety very frequently co-occurs with math LD, there are many students with no learning disabilities who still struggle with math anxiety. Every student deserves equal access to a math education that works for them, and addressing the needs of people with learning disabilities or anxiety is already an issue of equity: neurotypical students are not the only people whose needs must be met. But that issue goes even deeper when one realizes that a student's math anxiety may be borne out of stereotype threat, which is the sense of anxiety one experiences when they're worried about playing into a stereotype.
It is clear that, from purely a mental health standpoint, interventions to alleviate these students’ anxiety are absolutely necessary. But there is a further, more pedagogical motivation here, too: anxiety strongly affects academic performance and working memory, so addressing it will both help students take care of themselves and learn more effectively.
Fortunately, many interventions for other anxiety disorders are shown to work well for students with math anxiety. Practices rooted in mindfulness, like focused breathing exercises, have been shown to both allay students’ fears about math and improve their performance on math assignments.
There are lots of structured breathing exercises that have been shown to alleviate anxiety, such as guided visualizations (for instance, keeping an imaginary feather aloft with your breath) and four-corner or tactical breathing: breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds.
After enough practice, breathing exercises can be a quick and easy way to ground yourself, making them especially easy to implement in the middle of something stressful and time-sensitive. Meanwhile, more time-consuming interventions like guided visualizations or guided meditation can be a good practice before a major assessment. MyLife (formerly Stop, Breathe & Think) is a nice, free tool for introducing yourself to these techniques.
Journaling is another great tool used in treating anxiety, and has been shown to be very effective for math anxiety. In their study on math anxiety in undergraduate students, Park, Ramirez, and Beilock told student volunteers that they were about to take a math test, and asked students to “write as openly as possible about your thoughts and feelings regarding the math problems you are about to perform.... really let yourself go and explore your emotions and thoughts.... Please try to be as open as possible as you write.” They then allowed students to freewrite for seven minutes before they completed the test.
Of the students with math anxiety, those who were highly expressive about their anxiety had higher performance gains than those who used less specific language, and all of those who journaled did better than those who did not. That high-expression aspect suggests that emotional honesty is key to this process. Implementing this in a classroom means that it is essential to emphasize to students that no one will read their journals, so they can feel free to be as honest as possible.