Numbers crunch for maths phobics

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MY DAUGHTER Flora was just six when she announced that she didn’t understand a thing in maths lessons at school. We raised it at the next parents’ evening and were reassured that her maths was fine, but we began to notice that she sometimes made wildly illogical guesses when attempting basic addition and was easily confused by anything numerical.

She was also getting upset about maths at school, but the more her teachers tried to reassure us that she was doing well, the more Flora insisted she didn’t let them see that she spent maths lessons copying other children.

It wasn’t until she moved to a new school two years later that her difficulties were identified, revealing such a vast gulf between her attainment in numeracy and in literacy that we suspected she could have dyscalculia, a kind of dyslexia with numbers.

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Kids with Math Anxiety Show Different Brain Functions

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Kids who have math anxiety have altered brain functions, according to a recent study. Brain activity, when faced with equations and formulas from math, decreased with the panic feeling.

A study from the Standford University School of Medicine was published this week in Psychological Science, reported a brain scan was done on fifty children in the second and third grade. Researchers assessed the children for math anxiety with a modified version of a standardized questionnaire for adults, and also received standard intelligence and cognitive tests. They found children with a higher level of math anxiety had a harder time solving math problems and were less accurate compared to those children with lower math anxiety.

Vinod Menon, a co-author and professor of child psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Stanford said, “Children who said they had math anxiety had greater responses in the areas of the brain implicated in processing negative emotions like fear, particularly the amygdala. We also saw reduced activity in areas normally associated with mathematical problem solving.”

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