Category Archives: Research

Teachers can cause math anxiety which caused math achievement to go down

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In short the research tells us that higher math anxiety predicts lower math achievement and when the researchers looked at what is contributing to the math anxiety, they found that the student’s perception of the capability of the math teachers can create math anxiety. In the words of the researchers as follows:

To better understand the contextual factors underpinning maths anxiety, Lau and colleagues analysed data from 1,175,515 students who participated in three large international studies of achievement. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that students in countries with higher levels of maths anxiety tend to achieve lower maths grades.

The strongest predictor of maths anxiety was how competent students perceived their maths teacher to be: those with less confidence in their teacher tended to feel more anxious. Being set large amounts of maths homework, and parental involvement in homework, also contributed to anxiety to a lesser degree.

Read all about it: HERE

Diving deeper in neural representation of concepts

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New research used functional MRI to analyze patterns of brain activity corresponding to hundreds of familiar concepts and quantitatively characterized the informational structure of these patterns. The results indicate that conceptual knowledge is stored as patterns of neural activity that encode sensory-motor and affective information about each concept, contrary to the long-held idea that concept representations are independent of sensory-motor experience.

Read all about it: HERE

The Arabic numerals are key

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New research here showed that from all the numeracy you do with the children at home, the Arabic numerals seem to have the most impact on the development of their artithmatic skills.

Read all about it: HERE

Boys and girls share similar math abilities at young ages

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There has been much speculation about whether lower female participation rates in STEM fields can be traced to an innate male superiority in math and science. But a new University of Chicago study wanted to test whether boys and girls actually show different mathematical abilities at their earliest developmental stages.

SPOILER ALERT: The researchers found no major differences in numerical processing between genders, noting “these findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood.”

Read all about it: HERE

What is numeracy ?

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All agree that numeracy is a solid predictor for later arithmatic skills however, there is no real consensus about what factors contribute to this or what that numeracy now really is. New research here looked at a number of published research articles on the topic and came with interesting points.

Read all about it: HERE