Dr. Erin Maloney (00:00):

It’s the anxiety itself in many ways that can cause people to underperform.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:06):

Welcome back to Math Teacher Lounge. I’m Bethany Lockhart Johnson.

Dan Meyer (00:10):

And I’m Dan Meyer.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:11):

This is episode two of our new season, all about math anxiety. Who has it? What is it? What do we do about it?

Dan Meyer (00:20):

I’m learning so much, learning a ton.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:22):

I loved our first conversation with Dr. Gerardo Ramirez, episode one, our first episode of the season. Really, our goal with that conversation was just to—we need to talk about the basics of it, for reals. Like, what is math anxiety?

Dan Meyer (00:36):

What is it? How do you measure it? How’s it defined? Super-helpful stuff.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:40):

There’s not only one way that it’s measured. But it’s like, in active research right now, how are folks making sense of it? And I think Dr. Ramirez did such a fantastic job of sharing that with our listeners. And I learned a lot. You learned a lot, Dan?

Dan Meyer (00:56):

I did. And I’m also super-excited to take that knowledge that we have developed together and go and build on top of it and keep on climbing up up the mountain here, and learn more about math anxiety. Which is why we’re super-excited to have a guest on, Dr. Maloney, who is going to help us learn more—especially about what happens to the brain when it’s experiencing math anxiety. There’s some really complex stuff that happens there, including the role of parents and educators in creating and resolving math anxiety. And I think we’ll also learn that the whole situation is a bit of a hot mess. And we’ll try to make it a little bit less messy together.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (01:34):

Little bit less messy. Dan, if we do nothing else, can we make it a little less messy?

Dan Meyer (01:41):

I sometimes prefer more mess, but in this case I prefer less. So.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (01:45):

I have a two-year-old, so everything is a mess.

Dan Meyer (01:47):

Your life is mess. Yes. <laugh> Right. Well, I’m excited for you folks to hear this. It was a delightful conversation, so yeah, tune in. We are joined by Dr. Erin Maloney.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (01:56):

Let’s go. We are joined by Dr. Erin Maloney, associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, where she directs the Cognition and Emotion Laboratory, as well as serving as the Canada Research Chair in Academic Achievement and Well-being. Welcome to the show, Dr. Maloney. We’re so excited to have you in the Lounge.

Dr. Erin Maloney (02:20):

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is fantastic.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (02:24):

So our last season was all about math and joy. And even when I read your title, I felt more joyful. Like, somebody is thinking about academic achievement, but with well-being in mind. I love it.

Dr. Erin Maloney (02:39):

Aw, thank you.

Dan Meyer (02:40):

Cognition and emotion!

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (02:42):

E-mo-tion!

Dr. Erin Maloney (02:43):

I don’t think they can be separate. I think that you have to think about them together, ’cause they’re so intricately connected.

Dan Meyer (02:49):

Love that. People try, but we love that. Yeah. That’s our vibe here, too.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (02:52):

People try. That was a big problem with my math anxiety. They just wanted…there was no room for my emotion. They’re like, stop weeping at your desk—

Dan Meyer (03:00):

It’s rearranging neurons….

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (03:01):

—you’re distracting the other children. So would you mind telling us the story of how you even got interested in this topic? You know, when you tell people that you study math anxiety—or, actually, I don’t know how you describe it to them; I’m hopeful you bring in that well-being part—but how did you get here? What do you, what do you, what do you…yeah, tell us! We love it!

Dr. Erin Maloney (03:23):

<laugh> I feel like what you’re actually asking is, “How did you make life choices that got you to here?” <Laugh>

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (03:29):

Justify your life choices! Ready? Go!

Dr. Erin Maloney (03:32):

<laugh> Whoo. OK. So, all right. So we often, in psychology, we joke that instead of doing research, we do “me-search.” And that’s, that’s admittedly true in my case. I was a student who absolutely loved math up until about eighth grade, and then something changed, and all of a sudden I was terrified of math and I had absolutely no sense of self-efficacy in it. Despite trying really hard, I was extremely anxious about it. And so I initially, I set out…my parents were completely convinced that I was absolutely capable of doing mathematics and that I was getting in my own way. And when I went to university, I decided to prove them wrong. So I set out to prove that some people just can’t do math, and that’s the end of it. And, you know, 20 plus years later, my parents were right. And it turns out that many people—well, I would argue virtually everyone—can do math. And that if you are really anxious about it, it can get in the way. And interestingly, you know, in, in the years that we’ve been doing this research, there’s really good strategies that can be used—that hopefully we get a chance to chat about—that can really help reduce the amount of anxiety that students are experiencing. But I really did set out, like the bold teenager that I was, to prove my parents wrong. And that backfired <laugh>. So I know it’s kind of a strange answer, but it’s the truth. So I was really interested in understanding why it was some people just could not do math.

Dan Meyer (05:10):

That makes two for two so far, on guests for this season who did a version of me-search. And I feel like this is pretty common for a lot of researchers. Like, I wanna figure out…my experience as a teacher, the part where you, I think, diverge from a lot of people I knew in grad school, myself included, is that you actually let counter evidence change your perspective on things. Whereas I feel like a lot of us go in: “I know this is true and I’m gonna gather data!” and lo and behold, I’m true! But only now, with the research TM, you know, trademarked research, attached to it. So that’s, really exciting. Thanks for sharing that.

Dr. Erin Maloney (05:43):

No, you’re welcome.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (05:44):

But don’t people say that the more personal you get, the more universal it is? Right? So if you go and get your doctorate about something that you think is just your experience or in your brain, then people are gonna be gonna be like, “Wait a second; you think that too?” “Wait, that math anxiety isn’t just you?” I don’t know, it sounds like a pretty great path to me. When you tell folks that you study math anxiety or when you’re speaking to folks about your research, do you find that there is a lot of folks who relate to what you’re studying? Or how does that conversation typically go?

Dr. Erin Maloney (06:20):

Yeah, so it is I think an extremely relatable topic. Not in the sense that everyone experiences anxiety about math, but everyone seems to know somebody who’s really anxious about math. Or everyone’s at least aware of the stereotype that like some people are math people and some people aren’t, and that’s just the way it is. So it feels like everyone has feelings about math and everyone seems very happy to share those feelings. So one thing I’ve always found really interesting, and actually, so I, I know you mentioned that you had Gerardo on recently. Gerardo and I have had really interesting conversations about how people are really quick to tell you that they hate math and they can’t do math, and they’re anxious about math. And I’ve yet to have anyone ever tell me they hate reading, they can’t read, they’re really anxious about reading as an adult. So for some reason math seems really different. And in that sense people always seem to be pretty excited to talk about their feelings towards math.

Dan Meyer (07:23):

Yeah, definitely. Been on an airplane or two myself and had those conversations. You know, people asking to be reseated because they found out that I do math for a living or whatever. Or just unburdening themselves, for sure. I’m super-curious: I think that the fact that you are doing the me-search is reason enough to want to dedicate your life to this study. But I am curious: If you were gonna justify to someone else, why is math anxiety important to study? What are its consequences, even outside of math education? What would you say to that?

Dr. Erin Maloney (07:57):

So I think it’s probably not hard to convince people that success in math is important, right? So we know that children who start elementary school behind in mathematics tend to stay behind in mathematics, unless they have any kind of very targeted intervention. We know that children who do worse in mathematics throughout K to 12 education in general get lower-paying jobs when they’re older. We also know that when they do worse than mathematics relative to their peers, there’s fewer jobs that are open to them, relative to if they excelled in math. Right? And so I think in many ways there are really clear consequences for students who are not comfortable with math and who avoid it. But I think one of the really, really interesting things about math anxiety, and maybe part of why I’ve fallen in love with it as a research topic is that it’s the anxiety itself in many ways that can cause people to underperform. So it’s not just the case that people who are bad at math are anxious about it. It’s actually that the anxiety itself can cause you to do worse in math. And that for me is really exciting, ’cause it means that if we can change your mindset, then we can really set you on a path with several more options available to you career-wise. And I think that is really empowering.

Dan Meyer (09:18):

Hmm. Yeah, definitely. And I’d love for you to explore — your laboratory is the cognition and emotion laboratory, which I love, how you’re creating those linkages between how you feel about a thing and what your opportunities or your aptitude for learning it. I’m really curious, can you say more about the, the relationship there? How does feeling anxiety impair your ability to do mathematics?

Dr. Erin Maloney (09:41):

Yeah, so feeling anxiety, typically what you tend to experience is these negative thoughts and ruminations. So you can imagine, you’re somebody who doesn’t really love math, you’re pretty anxious about it; you know, Bethany, maybe you’ve had this kind of experience before. I’m gonna call you out on it. I’ve had it many times, where you sit down to do a math test and all of a sudden you’re not focusing on the actual math test in front of you. You’re focusing on things like the consequences of not doing well on this. Right? Or “my parents are gonna be really disappointed if I don’t pass this test,” or “my teacher is gonna think negatively negative of me,” or sometimes we see things like, “I’m a girl, girls don’t do math.” These types of stereotypes. And what happens is that those thoughts actually tie up really important cognitive resources, like, really important memory resources, that you need to do the math test. And so if you are trying to essentially do two things at once, right? You’re trying to deal with all these negative thoughts that are distracting you and you’re trying to do the math test, then you’re not going to do as well as someone who’s sitting down and doesn’t have all of these distracting thoughts to deal with. And we actually know that from research that we have in our lab right now, where we just ask people like, “Hey, when you did this math test, what kind of stuff are you thinking about?” what we find is that the people who are really anxious about math report a whole bunch of thoughts that are unrelated really to the math test, per se. It’s more about the consequences of doing poorly. And as a result of those thoughts, they actually end up doing worse.

Dan Meyer (11:14):

This has been really helpful to figure out, how the emotional state of doing math affects the ability to do math. And it’s really interesting how you’re saying that the direction of the causality can go from the emotions to the cognition. And I’m just curious then, what is the source of the bad emotions about math? Where does that come from? Is it nature? Is it nurture? Some combination? How do you see it?

Dr. Erin Maloney (11:39):

Yeah, so one, that’s a fantastic question. And there’s been a whole bunch of people all around the world that have been spending a lot of time really trying to pinpoint that down. And I think the answer is that it’s, you know, it’s complex. So most of what it’s looking like right now is that it is a combination of both. So essentially what we find is that kids who start elementary school who are a little bit behind in math—and for the question of why they’re behind, that’s also complex; it could be genetics, it could be just environmental input, before the child ever entered formal schooling kind of thing—but in essence, what we find is that kids that start school behind in mathematics, those are the children who are most likely to develop anxiety about math by the time they’re finished first grade. OK? But we also know that once they’ve developed the anxiety about math, then that’s when they get these thoughts and ruminations that kind of tie up those memory resources, that then is gonna make it harder for them to succeed in math tests. So you get into this sort of vicious cycle, right? Where maybe you start behind a little bit and then you develop the anxiety, the anxiety causes you to underperform relative to what you should be able to, so now you’re even further behind, you get more anxious because you’re not doing as well as you’d like to…but again, kind of coming back to the “Why are the children starting behind in the first place?” Some of that seems to be the role that parents are playing in the household. So some kids come from a household where parents are playing a lot more math games with them, talking about mathematical concepts on a regular basis. Maybe they have older siblings who are, you know, practicing arithmetic and, and mathematical processing in front of them. And so those kids are exposed to more math before they ever even start formal schooling. Those kids seem to do better. And then we also know that the parents’ attitudes matter a lot too. So what we find is that when parents are high in math anxiety themselves, especially when they help their children a lot with their math homework in really early ages, we find that those kids end up being more anxious about math by the end of the school year, and they also end up doing worse in mathematics. So it really does seem to be, you know, kind of a complex set of factors that have something to do with both maybe genetic predisposition to success in math and genetic predisposition to anxiety, but then also the social attitudes and stereotypes about math to which you’re exposed at home that really seem to be coming together to create this anxiety in young children.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (14:24):

I feel like everything you’re saying is <laugh>…it makes so much sense and yet it’s so often not talked about, right? Because it’s just more like, it gets boiled down to, “Oh, they’re just not a math person,” instead of all these other factors that are at play. And I completely remember the anxiety I felt, whether it was a test or not, walking into my math classroom when I was in ninth grade. And there’s no way I was set up and ready to learn. Right? <Laugh>. And something with—we mentioned Dr. Ramirez, he was talking about validating that anxiety. If teachers validate that like, “Oh, you know what, sometimes you might feel stumped, or this might feel overwhelming.” Even the power in creating space for that in the classroom, right? And acknowledging that it doesn’t—math doesn’t have to “come easy” to you in order for you to have access or make sense, is such a powerful concept. And I love the way that you are looking at all these different factors and saying, “Hey, it’s both simple and also a lot more complicated than we’re we’re making it.” Right?

Dr. Erin Maloney (15:36):

No, and I agree with that sentiment so much. Like, I think, though—one thing I will sort of caution is that I think when teachers are validating the anxiety, or when parents are validating the anxiety, I think there’s a very fine line that needs to be walked where we need to be able to say, you know, “It’s OK to struggle with something. That’s, that is completely OK.” And as we’re, you know, as we’re working towards something that’s really valuable, right? We can, we can work hard at something and by working hard at it, we’re going to get better. And I think that type of validating is really, really important and valuable. I think what we wanna be careful of is not to say things like, “Oh, it’s OK. I also never loved math.” And, you know, “Oh, I was never a math person either.” And so even though we might be bringing comfort to the the child, I think that that’s sending the wrong message. And so sometimes it’s really well intentioned and really not great—

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (16:37):

A hundred percent.

Dr. Erin Maloney (16:38):

—in terms of the messaging. So that’s the only…so just for people listening, the only sort of caution that I would give there is that I think there’s nuances to the validating of the feelings that are important.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (16:50):

I am so glad you said that because as a kindergarten teacher, I vividly remember—and this is as early as, you know, the kids are five years old, right?—and I remember in a parent-teacher conference, a parent saying, “Oh, I wasn’t a math person either,” or, “Oh, no, ugh.” And they were so quick, like you said, they wouldn’t say that about reading, but they were so quick to talk about their lack of natural math aptitude, right? And, and it was really interesting because you know that even if they’re not saying that specific thing at home, those attitudes are absolutely carrying over at home. And they’re absolutely carrying over to, to how they interact with their kiddo around math and around what’s happening in the conversations about math. And I felt like a lot of times my work as a teacher was also to help support parents through their own math anxiety, and help give them some new language for how they can talk about math. And that math is more than just getting to an answer quickly. Like, let’s talk about, let’s go on math walks, let’s go on number walks, what numbers are around the home? Or oh, is that bigger than this? Do you have more of this? And even those little things, I, my hope was that it was starting to shift the conversation around what math was possible in the home, particularly when you saw that it was the parents who had palpable math anxiety. Right? And how much you know that that’s gonna impact what’s happening when you sit down to do homework together.

Dr. Erin Maloney (18:22):

Yeah. And I love that you have worked to encourage parents to do that. So we do similarly. Like even from a research perspective, where I will often give talks to parents and teachers and we talk about the idea of trying to mathematize everything, right? So just the idea that math is absolutely everywhere, and you know, whether it’s a matter of playing games in the car with your kids where you’re thinking of a number and it’s “My number is higher than 42, but lower than 80, and what number do you think I might be thinking of?” And, and gradually trying to get the child to that number. Or, you know, asking questions like, “What’s your favorite even number and why?” And just little things like that that, that I think can make math fun for kids, that help—I don’t even know how to explain it, but just that idea of bringing joy into it, so it’s not always this heavy subject that kids have to come to. So we definitely try to talk to parents about the idea of, like I said, mathematizing everything. And usually it’s well-received, ’cause often parents find it empowering, right? They’re like, “Oh, well, I could do that! But like, that’s not math!” And you’re like, “No, but it is.”

Dan Meyer (19:33):

Yep.

Dr. Erin Maloney (19:34):

Like, it is! And sometimes parents will say like, “Well, I don’t know how to do fractions.” And you’re like, “OK, but how do you bake?” “Well, I don’t know! I just, like, I know how to do those fractions!” And you’re like, “OK, but that’s the starting point. Let’s work with that.” Like, let’s, you know. And I think a lot of times, it’s reminding the parents that they’re actually far more capable than what they think they are, despite the fact that maybe they struggled with math when they were younger.

Dan Meyer (19:58):

Yeah. This is so interesting. And I feel like part of the challenge around conversations about anxiety and math and how to, how to resolve it and where it comes from, is that it, like, it presupposes a single definition of math. And so, you know, we’re talking about like how to be more mindful about math. But you know, like if kids were walking every day through a treacherous street, you know, the solution might not be become more mindful about that street. It’s just like, we gotta fix the treacherous nature of the street, really. You know, I love that we’re talking also about redefining what math is, making it more playful. That feels like a super-important component here. I’d love to know more about what you know about the role of gender in all of this. Are there differences in the way boys and girls experience math anxiety and how it relates to achievement in math?

Dr. Erin Maloney (20:48):

Yeah, so, there’s really, really interesting research on gender in math anxiety. So in general, we find that girls tend to experience more anxiety about math than boys do. So one hypothesis is that it has to do with just social stereotypes that, you know, girls are, are good at reading; boys are good at math, kind of thing. So there’s some evidence to suggest that that might be playing a role. There’s other evidence to suggest as well that maybe boys actually do experience as much anxiety, they just don’t really own up to it.

Dan Meyer (21:20):

Ooh, yikes.

Dr. Erin Maloney (21:21):

So thoughts are, you know, there’s a bit of an apprehension for males to admit experiencing the anxiety. But I think one of the things that is extremely interesting about it—at least to me—is that we don’t tend to see gender differences in young children. So in early elementary school, even though we’ll see that kids as young as six years old will experience anxiety about math, and that that anxiety is related to how well they do in math and how much they enjoy math, it doesn’t seem to vary as a function of gender at that young age. It doesn’t seem to be related to gender until kids are at about sixth, seventh grade that we really start to see this gender difference coming online. And so that, to me, suggests that it’s probably something more social than biological at play. It probably has something more to do with these stereotypes and stuff. But another really interesting—or at least, I’m biased, but to me—another really interesting line of research that comes into play—and some of this is stuff out of my own lab—so we know that boys in general tend to do better at spatial processing than girls. And we know that spatial processing is really important for math, right? So math and space are pretty connected. And by spatial processing, I mean things like being able to picture something rotating in your mind or, you know, envisioning how these puzzle pieces might fit together. And so we know that boys tend to do better at that type of processing. And the gender difference there seems to be related to gender differences in math anxiety. So there’s some speculation, too, that it might be that as the math starts to become more reliant on spatial processing, that that’s when we see this separation between boys and girls with respect to how much anxiety they feel about math. So a lot of this is to say, I think the answer to the gender question right now is what I think what we would officially call a bit of a hot mess, <laugh> where I think there’s probably more questions than answers. But I think that there’s definitely something going on. And it really seems to be coming on later in elementary school.

Dan Meyer (23:32):

That’s a refreshingly honest admission from a social scientist, that it’s a hot mess and not perfectly clear, <laugh> so I appreciate that. It’s interesting what you said about the spatial reasoning. In our work creating curriculum at Amplify, I find we lean a lot on trying to tie abstract math towards spatial topics. Like, can you estimate a quantity before you calculate it? Can you identify a pattern and where it breaks before you prove it abstractly? And, I dunno, it’s just interesting to me. I’m just thinking out loud about how I feel like math becomes more abstract rather than more spatial. The farther you venture into secondary math…I’m wondering if I misunderstand what you’re meaning by spatial, and the progression of math from K–12.

Dr. Erin Maloney (24:20):

Yeah, so I think you can still have—you can have math be abstract, but still really relying on spatial processing. Right? And I think part of that is maybe a bit of us having different definitions of when we say “spatial.” So in cognitive science, when we talk about spatial representations or spatial reasoning, it’s really like anything you’re picturing in your mind, any time you’re really picturing these things in your mind and manipulating those images at all. So if you imagine, even like at a simple level, but it’s gonna hold when you’re going more complex as well. So doing like equivalence problems, for example, where you have to balance the equations.

Dan Meyer (24:58):

Yeah.

Dr. Erin Maloney (24:59):

Even just being able to envision things kind of moving around that equal sign and bringing one piece of the equation from this side to the other is actually an extremely spatial kind of reasoning. Right? Or when you’re expanding, that’s actually extremely extremely spatial, despite the fact that it might not feel like it initially. Obviously anything in geometry is going to be very spatial. So I think, in that sense, we would argue that the spatial processing is still playing a pretty important role. But it’s maybe a different type of spatial processing than what we’re seeing at a very early level in elementary school. That said, you can completely disagree with me too. ‘Cause I could also just be wrong, and that’s fair. My kids tell me I’m wrong all the time. So I’m used to <laugh> being told that I’m wrong.

Dan Meyer (25:47):

Well, we’re a bit more deferential on this here show, with our guests. So I would not do that. But it makes sense, what you’re saying about how these are things that you manipulate in your mind, whether they are Xs and Ys or numbers and fractions. These are all things that we manipulate. That ties into differences in this spacial reasoning category, it sounds like, which then contributes to math anxiety. And it does start to feel like there’s a lot going on here, is what it feels like.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (26:14):

You mean hot mess?

Dan Meyer (26:16):

I meant hot mess.

Dr. Erin Maloney (26:17):

Yeah. <laugh>, I think that’s the technical term, right? I’m pretty sure that’s the technical term for it.

Dan Meyer (26:21):

I didn’t know the citation for it. So I didn’t say it. But I knew who in literature named that. But yeah.

Dr. Erin Maloney (26:28):

I’ll write something at some point.

Dan Meyer (26:30):

We’ll cite Maloney, 2022. Yeah. Yes.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (26:34):

So I will say that one of my dreams in thinking about this season and last season, but particularly this season, since we’re really getting to talk to some researchers who get to think about this, and have really interesting conversations about it all the time…one of my dreams is that we’re bringing—’cause we do have some folks who are researchers that are listening, right? But then we also have teachers and folks who are in the classroom every day, and parents and caregivers listening. And so I think one of the beautiful things about the way that I hear you talking about it is you’re thinking about the research, but it’s so applicable. Right? And I wonder if there’s anything else you can say around it. I wanna reduce that divide, that gap, between the research that’s happening and then what’s happening with the kiddos and in the classroom and at home. And I don’t know if it’s like a magic wand thing where like <laugh> if there were changes you’d wanna see at a societal level, to try to combat math anxiety, but you see where I’m going. You know, it’s like <laugh>….

Dr. Erin Maloney (27:39):

1. So I’m gonna answer maybe in two ways. So I think the first thing that I’m hearing from you is that idea of diminishing this divide, right? And so one thing I try to keep in mind, as someone who’s a researcher and working in the lab, I will often be called in to talk to teachers and give professional development sessions. And they often want the sage-on-the-stage academic, that stands up there and tells you the answers to things. And one of the first things that I’m gonna admit when I get up there is, “I am not on the front lines.” So what I do in the lab, for me to tell you that that’s gonna work in a classroom of 30 kids who may or may not have eaten dinner that day, and may or may not have snow pants, and may or not…like it’s–

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (28:23):

Mmm, yes.

Dr. Erin Maloney (28:24):

You know, I think we also need to be a little bit reasonable. So I try really hard in my own program of research to make sure that I’m always talking to teachers and to principals and to curriculum designers to make sure that the ideas that I have make sense. In fact, one of the most recent book chapters that I wrote, I wrote in collaboration with a really good friend of mine who’s a principal, an elementary school principal, and a former math consultant. And we wrote it together, to really say like, “Hey, here’s how we can help each other inform how research can inform practice and how practice can also inform research.” ‘Cause he can come to me and say, “I’m doing this. I can’t find anything in the literature to support this, but I’m sure it works!” And we can design something in the lab to test whether or not it seems like it’s gonna work.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (29:11):

That’s huge. Yeah.

Dr. Erin Maloney (29:12):

Empirically. And so I think that open communication is massive. One thing that we’re doing in my own lab to try to keep that open communication available. So to anyone listening who’s ever tried to get access to a journal article, they’re held behind paywalls, right? So one, the way it works, my understanding of this anyway, is that the journal owns the formatted version of the paper. So what we do is we put up audio recordings of all of the research papers that we ever publish. So I’m pretty sure I own the words as the author, and the journal owns the prettified version that you can buy. So we audio-record all of our papers, so that if teachers or parents ever want to hear the actual science that’s going into some of these decisions, they have access to at least the stuff that we do in our lab. And we also put up an infographic for every paper, just highlighting kind of the main questions and main findings. And we do that because I think that the only way for the information to actually be useful is if it gets into the hands of the stakeholders that actually need that information.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (30:21):

And is accessible. That’s huge. That’s huge!

Dr. Erin Maloney (30:24):

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s one way that we try to do it. And like I said, the other thing, we try to always be working with principals and with teachers. I joke that the way that I remedied this in my own life…so my husband’s a teacher; it’s like, I just married one! It’s fine! <laugh> I can grill him on a regular basis, and be like, “I wanna try this experiment. Do you think it’s gonna work?” And he can say, like, “It’s not going to. Here’s why.”

Dan Meyer (30:47):

That’s awesome. Marrying a participant—you know, a research participant—is unethical, of course. Would not clear IRB. But turning your partner into a participant? Like, what are you gonna do? That’s great.

Dr. Erin Maloney (30:57):

Yeah, no, that’s fair game.

Dan Meyer (30:58):

Yep.

Dr. Erin Maloney (30:59):

Yeah. So that’s—I think we we compensate each other <laugh>. So, no…so I do joke a little bit about that. He was a teacher simply ’cause he wanted to be one. Not ’cause I needed him to be one. But, I think that communication part is, is really key. That’s one thing. Then the other part of the question or the other sort of piece of the question that I was hearing is that idea of, how do we fix math anxiety. Right? Like, what’s the great, “I’m glad that there’s a whole bunch of time and effort and energy going into trying to understand this, but what, where are we at?” And I think with that, it’s really, really promising. So there’s been a lot of research coming out looking at how best to help children or even adults manage their own anxiety about math. And there’s a few really interesting strategies that seem to be quite effective. So one, and I don’t know if—um, it feels weird calling him Dr. Ramirez, just ’cause I know him well!—but I don’t know if Dr. Ramirez would’ve talked about this when he chatted with you, but he has some really interesting work on expressive writing. Did he chat about that at all?

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (32:07):

He didn’t, but I’ve read some of his work about it and I think it’s so fascinating.

Dr. Erin Maloney (32:11):

Yeah! So, OK, well, I’ll tell you about his work on it.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (32:13):

Yes, please. Please.

Dr. Erin Maloney (32:14):

Because it’s super-useful. So when we talked about that idea of how anxiety causes these thoughts and ruminations, and they tie up the memory resources that you need, what Gerardo has found is that when you get students to write about their anxiety for about 10 minutes before they do a test, what ends up happening is they end up doing better on the test, relative to if they would not have written about their anxiety at all. And this is particularly true for students who are really high in anxiety. OK? And the idea is that all of those thoughts that they were going to have about the test or the consequences of the test, et cetera, you just kind of get ’em…it’s like a mind dump where you get ’em all onto the page at first before you even go to do the test. And now when you go to do the test, you’re not having to do two things at once. You’re no longer dealing with these thoughts ’cause you got ’em all out on the paper beforehand. And so Gerardo has some really interesting work showing that that works for math anxiety. And then it also works for just testing anxiety in general. And so that’s a strategy that I love. I also—part of what I really love about it is it’s so low-cost, right? You need a paper and a pencil and it’s great. So those are always my favorite strategies, the ones that don’t really cost us anything. So that’s one way of dealing with like the cognitive part of the anxiety. The other thing you can do is try to deal with the anxiety part of the anxiety. So for that, what we find is that the typical strategies that you’re gonna see for anxiety tend to work for math anxiety. So things like focused breathing. Right? Making sure you’re doing deep inhales and exhales. That really diaphragmatic breathing seems to be quite helpful. We know that what we call progressive desensitization is really key. That’s the idea of doing things, you know, starting with the questions that you know how to handle. And then gradually working up to the more difficult questions. So you’re sort of gradually exposing yourself to the more complex stuff. And how that can play out on an actual test at school is, you sit down, and instead of just starting with question number one, you actually read the whole test, see which questions you feel like you know the best, start with those questions, and that helps build your confidence so that you’re better able to tackle the questions that are maybe a little bit outside of where you’re currently at. So that seems to be really helpful. The other part that I will say, too, that’s extremely helpful: So we know that anxiety really ties up those memory resources. And so the more you can make the math automatic, the more immune it’s going to be to anxiety in the moment. And so I know that this part can be a little bit controversial, because we don’t wanna necessarily demotivate children, and kill the enthusiasm for math that we’re trying to cultivate…but really, you know, really committing your arithmetic facts to memory can be extremely helpful. So really learning those times tables, really learning your addition and subtraction facts. ‘Cause what happens is, then when you’re in a situation where you need that information, even if you’re anxious and you’re working with fewer cognitive resources than what you would normally have, you actually don’t need that many cognitive resources to be able to pull something from memory that you’ve memorized. So it really helps to kind of protect you against some of the negative impacts of the anxiety while you’re doing that test.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (35:37):

And you’re not using all your cognitive resources to figure out seven times eight, because you can really focus on what you’re trying to do with that. Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Erin Maloney (35:47):

Yes. No, a hundred percent right. And so I know that’s one that, like I said, I know it can be somewhat controversial because it’s…you know, we’ve talked about—or we haven’t talked about in this conversation, but we often talk about—the idea of drilling and killing. Right? So you drill the facts, you kill the, the enthusiasm. But I think that there are ways that we can drill arithmetic facts, or help make them automatic, but still fun, right? It doesn’t have to always be in a high-pressure kind of way.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (36:16):

Totally. And we’ve talked about fluency, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it more in the Lounge. And that is interesting, that link between anxiety when the fluency isn’t there, that—or, of course we hear about anxiety with timed tests, but the idea of that IS something you can do to reduce it, because you have those facts just at your ready. Right?

Dr. Erin Maloney (36:37):

Yeah. So I actually, again, I’m gonna be a little bit controversial. So I don’t hate timed tests in the way that a lot of people do. But I love time to practice. So I think once we’ve got to a point where children have a fairly decent understanding of skills, of a skill, once they’ve got a fairly decent grasp on it, then I love the idea of the timed practice. So it can be still in a low-pressure situation, where in many ways it doesn’t matter if you get the answer to the question correct. But we’re practicing doing it in a situation in which you might be feeling a little bit of pressure, but it’s not real pressure, if that makes sense. And I think that can be really, really useful for students. And again, it can be done in a fun way, right? It doesn’t have to be these super-intense ways. It can be fun. But I think that in life there are situations in which the time that it takes you to complete a problem matter. And I think that we have to make sure that we don’t get too far away from that.

Dan Meyer (37:40):

Yeah. It feels like we should do an entire other episode thinking about ways to develop that fluency and automaticity that don’t contribute to anxiety, or create further disparities between people who are high math anxiety and low math anxiety. Not a small question, I’m sure. And I appreciate you alluding to all of that. You know, this whole thing, as you said, is quite the hot mess. And I feel like you, Dr. Maloney, have helped us make this a little less messy, in our heads, and hopefully the listeners’ heads. I really appreciate that. I just love…you’ve mentioned lots of resources that you have. You’ve alluded to them: audiobook-style readings of your research, which I need ’cause I just finished, you know, Harry Potter, the seventh book, so I need a new thing to listen to like that. Also infographics. Can you tell our listeners where they can find this work of yours, and if there are any other kinds of resources that you wanna plug for our listeners here?

Dr. Erin Maloney (38:32):

Yeah, for sure. So all of our resources can be found on my lab website. So the address for that is www.ErinMaloney.ca. So there we have, like you said, the infographics and the audio articles and all that stuff. And then we also have a link to a new kids’ book out, actually, that a colleague of mine and I have published recently, that really walks through some of these strategies on combating math anxiety. The book is written as a children’s book, so it’s Peyton & Charlie Challenge Math. But it secretly is a book that would also work for adults. So if you are a parent that’s a little bit anxious about math, or a teacher that maybe is a little bit anxious, and you wanna see how some of these strategies can play out, in that book—we linked to it on the website, but it is available for purchase on Amazon. And the one thing I will say about the book, ’cause this is something that we were pretty proud of, so Sheri-Lynn Skwarchuk, who is a school psychologist, and I wrote the book. And it’s available for purchase at our cost price, so we don’t actually make any money on the book. It was literally just a way of getting some of the science out to people who might be able to benefit from it.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (39:45):

Reducing that divide!

Dr. Erin Maloney (39:46):

Yeah, well that’s what we’re trying to do! Right? So I think in the U.S., I think it’s like $6 on Amazon. And then in terms of other resources, we’re in the process right now of creating some informational videos and and stuff like that that hopefully will be useful for parents and for teachers, just in terms of understanding a little bit more about the anxiety and understanding how to deal with the anxiety in the classroom more, at home or wherever it might be coming up.

Dan Meyer (40:15):

Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate—we appreciate!—you coming on, and hearing about how you’re trying to bridge so many different barriers from research to practice, and school to home. It’s just really inspiring. And we’d love to have you back on sometime. So thank you so much for joining us.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (40:29):

I feel like we’ve just hung out! Don’t you, Dan?

Dan Meyer (40:31):

Are we rolling here? Oh my gosh, we’re rolling. I just thought we’re just hanging. Yeah,

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (40:34):

I thought we were just hanging!

Dr. Erin Maloney (40:36):

I know, I do, I really appreciate that it has a very kind of chill vibe to it.

Dan Meyer (40:41):

Chill vibe. Like a lounge.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (40:42):

It’s the lounge!

Dan Meyer (40:43):

Thank you. You get us; you get us. <laugh>

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (40:45):

Dan Meyer. I was shopping for children’s books, and there was this book, and it was talking about being at home with Mom. And it’s going through all the things that the child did that day with Mom. It’s like, “We played outside, we ran through the sprinklers, we even did some homework.” And it shows them sitting at the table with the homework, that’s clearly math homework, in front of them. And the mom is like, “Harrumph!” Like a very perplexed, anxious face. And there’s all these question marks above her. And it’s just like,

Dan Meyer (41:24):

“There should not be numbers on that paper!”

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (41:25):

Exactly. And the child is like, “Ohhhh,” you know. And I mean, I have to give credit to the illustrator, because they really did capture the clear message of this interaction, which was sitting down to do math homework or think about math together is a source of angst. Right? According to this author and according to too many people. And so I think what’s really important is that we recognize those images when we see them out there and speak back to them, and say, “Hey, wait a second.” Yeah, it can feel like that, and it doesn’t have to. And what’s going on that that’s just the assumed way that it’s gonna feel, to sit down and math together. You know?

Dan Meyer (42:11):

Yeah. It feels like we all have a lot of work to do on the whole math-anxiety front. Dr. Maloney helped us see how parents play a part, educators play a part, society and how they create people plays its own part in how we all define math as a thing where we evaluate student thought or where students play it with their thoughts, has its own huge part as well. So yeah, it was a really fantastic conversation with Dr. Maloney. I hope you folks will check out the show notes, where you will find links to Dr. Maloney’s website. A lot of her work, which as you heard, is very geared towards practitioners and parents and even directly at kids, especially the new children’s book she co-authored, Peyton & Charlie Challenge Math.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (42:55):

Next time we’re gonna dive even more into the nitty gritty of combating math anxiety. To do that, we’re actually gonna be joined—I am so excited about this—by Dr. Rosemarie Truglio from Sesame Workshop.

Rosemarie Truglio (43:09):

Our core audience are two- to four-year-olds, and they love math. And what’s not to love? Children don’t come with this math anxiety. Math anxiety is learned.

Dan Meyer (43:23):

So excited.

Dr. Erin Maloney (43:24):

Sesame Street was a huge part of my childhood and my toddler doesn’t know it yet, but Sesame Street is coming. It’s coming. Like, we’re we’re gonna introduce Sesame Street to him. We just haven’t yet.

Dan Meyer (43:37):

Sesame Street straight raised me.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (43:38):

Right?

Dan Meyer (43:39):

Yeah. Don’t tell my parents. But that’s, yeah, that’s true. I’m excited, too. It’s gonna be a blast.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (43:45):

I’m really excited. I think that the more we dive into this topic—which, again, we’re gonna look at math anxiety from a lot of different angles—and I’m excited to talk to Dr. Truglio about how we can take this research and these conversations that are happening about math and how it can actually impact what’s happening in homes. ‘Cause we wanna help create positive relationships with mathematics, with kids in math. I’m so excited. And I hope you folks keep listening. We love having you here in the Lounge. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Math Teacher Lounge, wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and a review. It helps more listeners to find the show, and let other folks know about this show. Recommendations are great. Thanks so much for listening.

Marjorie Schaeffer (00:00):

I think the most important thing we know from literature right now is that high math-anxious parents, when they interact with their children, their children learn less math over the course of the school year.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:12):

Welcome back to Math Teacher Lounge. I’m Bethany Lockhart Johnson.

Dan Meyer (00:15):

And I’m Dan Meyer.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (00:16):

We’re onto Episode 5, Dan, of our series on math anxiety. And I wanna say it feels so lovely to imagine all of these people out there doing work to help combat math anxiety. I dunno, it just makes me feel excited about the possibilities. This work is out there; it’s happening! Kids and teachers and caregivers are being impacted by these conversations. Not just — I mean, I don’t just mean the conversations we’re having on Math Teacher Lounge, but I mean, that these researchers are doing. Like, yes, we can change this!

Dan Meyer (00:53):

This is great. Yeah. We have people who are extremely smart, who have dedicated their professional lives to studying math anxiety and resolving it. And each of them that we’ve chatted with — they share lots of ideas in common, but I’ve loved how they each have their own different flavor or take or area of emphasis on a problem that hits everybody everywhere. It’s in your home, with kids and caregivers. It’s in schools. It’s in our places of teacher preparation and professional learning. Every place is a place where we can focus on resolving issues of math anxiety. It’s exciting.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (01:26):

Yeah, I feel like … if there could be a course in — we all know that our teacher prep programs, in MOST teacher prep programs, there’s not nearly enough math methods or time to cover <laugh> — it’s like ready, set, go! And depending on who your mentor teacher is or what your math methods course … I mean, it can totally shape the way that you are prepared or really not prepared for going out there to teach math! And so I love that we’re having these conversations.

Dan Meyer (01:55):

What I love about today’s conversation is, one, it’s got a little bit of a technology flavor, so there’s that. But I also love, it’s got one of my favorite features about change, which is that it focuses on change to action, change to routine, rather than change to belief. Rather than saying like, “OK, everybody! Everybody stop thinking bad beliefs about math and transmitting them to your kids!” Instead, it says, “What we’ll do is just, hey, we’ll set that aside for a second and we’re gonna do a certain thing every day and watch as those actions make your beliefs change.” That to me is extremely cool. And I think it has a higher likelihood of success than just, like, me telling parents, “Hey, stop thinking these thoughts!”

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (02:37):

“Ready, set, stop being anxious!”

Dan Meyer (02:39):

Exactly. Exactly. So it’s an exciting conversation we’re gonna have here.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (02:43):

Right. So it’s not a, you know, “wave the wand and all of a sudden, you’re not anxious about math anymore.” But these incremental changes, these incremental conversations, this validation, can really, really impact change. I’m with you on it, Dan. I hear what you’re saying.

Dan Meyer (03:01):

To help us talk through all of these ideas and more, we’re joined by Dr. Marjorie Schaeffer, Assistant Professor of Psychology at St. Mary’s College in Indiana.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (03:10):

Enjoy. <Jaunty music> So, yes, Dan, we are so excited to welcome Marjorie Schaeffer. She’s Assistant Professor of Psychology at St. Mary’s College. Dr. Schaeffer, we’re so excited you’re here. Hello!

Marjorie Schaeffer (03:28):

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dan Meyer (03:29):

Yeah. We are super-lucky to have had so many prolific and brilliant researchers about math anxiety on our show. You’ll be no exception. And every time, we love to find out about how you came to study math anxiety, which winds up being a really interesting glimpse into your backstory bio. So tell us, what is the route by which you came toward studying math anxiety?

Marjorie Schaeffer (03:51):

Oh, I love that question. I’m really interested in how the attitudes and beliefs of parents and teachers influence children, especially around math. And I actually became interested in this idea in college, when no Child Left Behind was actually first starting to be implemented in schools with high-stakes standardized testing. So much so that I actually did my thesis on this thinking about, “Do children understand the importance of high-stakes testing? Do they have anxiety around that idea?” And so that was really my first foray into the anxiety literature. And that was kind of the entry point into math anxiety for me.

Dan Meyer (04:28):

So you started by studying a very high-stakes assessment, like our students connecting with this. And the assessment is once per year. And classroom instruction is every day. So how did you move from the assessments to the everyday instruction?

Marjorie Schaeffer (04:44):

That’s a great question. So, after college, I actually taught kindergarten. And so from that, I saw the day-to-day impact of instruction and the day-to-day impact of children’s individual attitudes and beliefs. And so I really became interested in thinking about, “How do we understand why some children are really successful from the instruction happening in classrooms and why other children need a little bit more support?” And so math anxiety was one way for me to really think about the individual differences I saw in my kindergarten classroom.

Dan Meyer (05:18):

It feels like you headed … you went farther upstream, is what it feels like. Where assessment … there’s like some kind of anxiety around assessment, let’s say. And then you ventured farther up the stream to classroom instruction and then still farther into kids’ homes. It seems like your research invokes a lot of curiosity about the sources of a kind of amorphous, flowing phenomenon called math anxiety. And I’d love to hear a bit about what you know about how caregivers transfer, transmit — whatever the word is — math anxiety to their kids.

Marjorie Schaeffer (05:55):

For parents … we think that the attitudes and beliefs of parents matter. And we see that for lots of areas, not just math anxiety. But I think math anxiety, we see that really clearly. And so, we can think about it both in terms of what kind of input parents provide. So, how do families talk about math with their children? What kind of support do they provide around homework? And those are ones that I think are a little obvious. But we can also think about the offhanded comments that parents say to children when they’re talking about math generally. Right? So, we see lots of memes going around, talking about how hard math homework is. And so, I think when parents say offhanded comments like, “I’m not a math person,” or “We’re just bad at math,” that communicates values to children. I think the most important thing we know from literature right now is that high math-anxious parents, when they interact with their children, their children learn less math over the course of the school year. And this specific mechanism by which that happens is still an area for a lot of research. And so some people think it’s about input. So maybe if I’m math anxious, I’m avoiding math. And so, when I have an option to read a picture book that has math content, I focus on the colors instead. And so, my child is actually getting less math than other children. We can also think it’s about these messages that are provided. So, when I talk about math, I send the message to my child, it’s not for them, and therefore the child wants to engage in it less. And some of my work looks at things like expectations and values. So, thinking about, “Do math-anxious families actually value math less than other families unintentionally?” And so, we have some support for this idea that they expect less of their children. And so maybe when they struggle, they respond in different ways than a family who’s lower in math anxiety.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (07:53):

This is so fascinating to me. I also was a kindergarten teacher. And I remember a mom who just … she had such like palpable math anxiety. And during one of our conversations, she was talking about these homework sessions with her daughter. And I may have mentioned this on the podcast before. But she was talking about how every night they would sit together and they would do all this math. They’d do, like, extra math together. And it always ended in tears. And despite her math anxiety, she didn’t want her daughter to experience the math anxiety that she did. So she was trying to pile it on, so her daughter was more proficient and comfortable. And instead, it was perpetuating this anxiety about it. And so, it’s a phenomenon then, right? Even if a parent is saying, like you said, maybe completely unwilling, this mother was actually trying to do the opposite. She was trying to help, you know, imbue the love and comfort with math. Right?

Marjorie Schaeffer (09:01):

Absolutely. This is why I think in my research, it’s really important that we find low-stakes, low-stress ways for high math-anxious families to do math. They absolutely can support their children in doing math. But they need a little support. We want it to be a fun, low-stakes environment, right? So maybe that’s the connection back to high-stakes testing, that I want children to have fun math experiences.

Dan Meyer (09:28):

Yeah. This is challenging, because it feels like the more caregivers know about math anxiety, and its pernicious effects on students, and how easily transmitted it is, one could become quite anxious about math anxiety. And, you know, no one makes great decisions when they’re anxious. So if I’m recalling our various episodes we’ve done, we’ve heard from people say, “Well, you need to validate students’ math anxiety. This is not something to just ignore or brush past. But also, not validate it in a way that says, you know, ‘This is OK and generational and inevitable.’” Which presents parents with a very thin path to follow, it seems like. So I love what you’re saying about how we gotta just de-stress the whole process.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (10:11):

You’re avoiding the whole, “I wasn’t a math person either” kind of thing. <laugh>

Dan Meyer (10:15):

Right, right, right. Yeah. So I’d love to know more. We’re excited about the technology that you have studied and helped develop, presumably, called Bedtime Math, anapp for caregivers. And I’d love to know more about what that is and what it offers parents who know enough about math to know that they don’t want to transmit math anxiety to their children, but also want to support. So what does that offer them?

Marjorie Schaeffer (10:39):

So Bedtime Math is an app. It’s freely available on iTunes or the Apple Store or Google Play. And what it’s designed to do is to provide a nightly topical passage. So one of my favorites is the one about Groundhogs Day. And so it talks a little bit about the history of Groundhogs Day, and then it asks math-related follow-up questions. So starting at a preschool level, going through late fifth grade. And it’s really meant for parents to pick the one that meets their children where they are. And so the preschool-level question asks children to pretend to be a groundhog and walk to the left and walk to the right. So a skill that families might not think about as being math, but we actually think that IS part of understanding math. Understanding left and right directionality. And then the next question can ask questions like, “If it took the groundhog three seconds to climb out of the hole, and then two more seconds to see its shadow, how much time did it take all together?” So a simple addition problem, but it’s phrased in a fun way. And so the hope is that for high math-anxious families, these interactions are fun and playful. They don’t look like fights over homework. They’re just conversations that families can have around topics that are naturally interesting to children. And our hope is that when families have lots of these positive low-stakes interactions, they actually can see that we can talk about math in unstressful ways. In lots of ways, right? We can also do this at the grocery store. We can also do this while we’re cooking in the kitchen. It doesn’t just have to be fights over homework.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (12:14):

And I actually have the Bedtime Math — one of the Bedtime Math books. And I was so excited to find out that there’s an app. And I think one of the things that I loved about the book is that these are invitations, right? They’re exactly that. Low pressure <laugh>, and they’re invitations to have a conversation. And if we were just to tell parents, “Oh, just count!” or, “Hey, just count wherever you go!” You know? No. It’s, in a way, I think, like you said, it’s retraining the parents on what math could look like. Like, “Oh, I didn’t even think we could just kind of have this conversation and we’re actually doing math together.”

Marjorie Schaeffer (12:55):

Yes, absolutely. I absolutely agree. We want it to be fun and playful and not stressful. And we want it to also be things that are meaningful to children’s lives. So these are topics children are interested in. It’s not that we are using flashcards or making children practice math facts over and over again. These are things children should wanna do that can naturally fit into a child’s routine. So almost all families read books before bed, and what we hope is that math can also be a part of the nighttime routine.

Dan Meyer (13:27):

There’s something really subtle here going on that I just wanna name and ask a question about. First of all, it’s cool that you started with studying high-stakes stuff and now you are developing low-stakes stuff. And I’m really curious what makes a thing low-stakes? Like, a few things I’m hearing from you is that there’s, like … I have a small child that I read literature to on a nightly basis. And I feel very anxiety-free doing that. And it’s almost as though, because each of the — tasks is the wrong word for this, but experiences — involve some reading, it puts me, the parent, in a mode that is comfortable and familiar to me. I’m curious: Are there other, as you design, what, one per day for a year? All these different experiences. What are some of the principles that you lean on that help make a thing low-stakes for kids and for parents?

Marjorie Schaeffer (14:17):

Yeah, that’s a great question. So one thing we wanted to be really intentional about is that our app doesn’t look like a lot of traditional apps. There isn’t noises that go off. You don’t enter an answer. And so one of the things that we thought made it low-stakes is that while there is a right or wrong answer — there is a correct answer — we aren’t giving children upsetting feedback. Instead, what we wanna encourage families to do is, if you struggle to remember how many seconds it took the groundhog to come out of the hole, you can work through that with a parent. So it doesn’t feel like you’re getting negative feedback; you’re being told you’re bad at math; you did it wrong. Instead, you’re just getting natural support moving forward. And so that’s one thing we wanted to be really intentional about, was that it wasn’t going to be a negative experience for children. And we are trying to build on all of the positive interactions families are having around nightly book reading. So many ways this can look very similar. You get to read another story that’s topical and hopefully interesting. And then do these little questions together. And so for a lot of families, their children don’t actually really look at the question. It almost feels like the parent is just asking them on their own. Like, they just came up with it. They just wanted to know what would happen to the groundhog. If there were three more groundhogs? How many groundhogs would we have all together? Not like it’s gonna be like homework or other parts.

Dan Meyer (15:38):

So my understanding is that there isn’t a blank into which people type a number in, press “submit” for evaluation, receive the red X, the green check. That’s a key part of the design here.

Marjorie Schaeffer (15:50):

Yes, absolutely. And for research purposes, we would’ve loved to know what families were saying. But we think it’s really important that it’s fun, interactive, that families are working together to get to the right answer, that it’s not a test for children.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (16:03):

In your research, when you were — maybe you could walk us through the study a little bit. But I’m also curious if you heard from parents that it was carrying over beyond the bedtime routine. Because I would imagine, if I am building these skills and reading these questions and learning that I could talk to my kid like this about math in a fun way, that’s gonna happen then, like you said, when I’m in the grocery store. Or when I’m waiting in line for at the bank. Or whatever, you know? People go into banks now still, right?

Marjorie Schaeffer (16:35):

Yeah, absolutely. So in our study, we recruited almost 600 families and we randomly assigned them. So they had an equal chance of getting both our math app and what we call our control app. And that’s really just a math app without the math. We think of it as a reading control app. And that’s because we wanna make sure that families are having a similar experience, that it’s not just that having high-quality, fun interactions with your child is actually impacting children’s math achievement. And so what we then did is followed those children over the course of early elementary school. And so we worked with them in schools in the fall and spring of first, second, and third grade, really to look at their math learning. And so what we find is that children of high math-anxious adults, when they have the reading app, so what we think of as what’s happening in the real world, we see that really classic gap between children of high math-anxious adults and children of low math-anxious adults. So if you have a high math-anxious parent, you’re learning about three months less math over the course of first grade. But for children who receive this math app, we see this gap as closed. Those children look no different than a low math-anxious parent. And so that’s leading us to think that we’ve helped families talk about math in fundamentally different ways. We did a little bit of just talking to families to see a little bit about what might be going on. And a lot of families do report exactly what you’re describing, where they say this did help them talk about math in different ways they were doing it other times.

Dan Meyer (18:10):

That’s a really extraordinary study design. I don’t know … I love that you folks gave the control group not nothing. Like it’s possible that just parents and kids bonding over a thing regularly would be enough to provoke some kind of academic gain. But you gave the control group a thing that had them interacting socially, bonding, and still this large common gap between high-anxious and low-anxious parents, their kids shrunk together. Is that what I’m gathering here?

Marjorie Schaeffer (18:41):

Yeah, absolutely. So we’re basically seeing we can no longer, when we look at children’s data, say that parents’ math anxiety explains individual differences. So these children look really similar. They’re learning more than children who has a high math-anxious parent and just got our reading control app.

Dan Meyer (19:01):

just diving into the study a little bit more here, what is the time commitment? Or, did you guide parents to say, “All right, we’re gonna do this do this delightful story about a badger for an hour”? Or did people do it for five minutes? And what was the time commitment, roughly, for people?

Marjorie Schaeffer (19:17):

So we tell families to do it however they see fit. Because it is an app, we are able to get some sense of how long, and we are talking about three to six minutes for many families. For a lot of families, they’re reading a paragraph, the paragraph and a half, and then answering one or two questions. They’re not going through every possible question. They’re just doing a little bit, really meeting their kids where they are.

Dan Meyer (19:39):

Roughly how many times per week was that?

Marjorie Schaeffer (19:41):

So we asked families to do it as much as it fit. But we’re seeing about two and a half on average in the first year. And so families are fitting it in a couple of nights a week. It’s not every night.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (19:52):

So what it sounds like you’re saying is what really was powerful about this app is that it was the space and time and prompts between the caregiver and the child, that chance to really sit down and have some of these meaningful and positive math interactions. How did it shift those relationships?

Marjorie Schaeffer (20:12):

So one of the things I think that makes the app effective is the changing of expectations. After a year, families are really using the app a lot less. And I think that’s OK, that they have found other ways to incorporate math into their lives. And we find that we don’t see an impact on their math anxiety, that they aren’t becoming less math anxious from this experience. Which I think makes sense, because they have had a lifetime of math anxiety. But we do see a change in parents’ expectations and value of math. So they expect their children will be better at math, and they also report that math is more important in their children’s lives. And so I think that’s an important part of it, which is, we can change these values for families, even if we aren’t able to change the math anxiety of the adults in children’s lives.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (21:01):

I want to for a second before — because I’m loving this idea of the app, and I’m excited to find out more ways to cultivate these conversations in my home and also share this with other folks. Because even folks who don’t even maybe realize they have math anxiety … like you said, so often it’s unconscious. So often we’re putting these little snippets into our everyday conversation, like, “Oh yeah, I’m not a math person.” And we don’t even realize how much is impacting our kiddos and ourselves, right? So I am really curious: What do you think … in your research, what were some other takeaways that you feel like are really strategies that we can think about for combating math anxiety in general?

Marjorie Schaeffer (21:47):

So I’m particularly interested in thinking about how math-anxious adults can help tone down their anxiety so that they can have high-quality interactions with their children, that they interact with. And so one of the big takeaways for my research, I think, is that math-anxious families can help their children with math. They just need support. And so I think there are lots of ways for that support to look like. One, I think it can be an app, but I also think reading a little bit about math can be really helpful. So it’s not new. So the first time you aren’t thinking about some of these ideas is as your child has their homework open in front of you. And so you can process your own feelings separately before you have to do it with a child. I also think reminding parents that math is everywhere and that math is actually lots of things that we all love to do. Math isn’t just calculus. Not that calculus isn’t wonderful. But that math is measuring, math is counting ducks at the park. Math is talking about how many times did I go down this slide. And talking about math in this way, I think reminds families that they are great at that. That even if maybe they’ve had bad math experiences before, they can do math. Especially the way their preschool or early childhood, early elementary school student needs them to. And I think that can then set the foundation for being really successful later.

Dan Meyer (23:13):

So is your research then, your subsequent studies, your line of inquiry, is moving more towards how to support parents, then? Is that what I’m hearing?

Marjorie Schaeffer (23:22):

Yeah. So I’m really interested in both understanding how the math anxiety of parents and teachers influences children. And so math anxiety is really common and we know that it’s particularly common in early elementary school teachers. And so it’s very likely that children are interacting with a highly math-anxious adult. And so I’m really interested in thinking about how we can support those individuals in doing it. And so both, I think, things like Bedtime Math, which provide fun, unscripted ways to do that, but I’m also interested in the teacher equivalent. So, thinking about whether having things like a math coach can help teachers have more positive experiences with math. So if you see someone else play math games with your students, can that help you do it as well?

Dan Meyer (24:09):

It makes me wonder a lot about an app for teachers or an app for parents, one that’s not designed to be co-consumed with kids and their parents. But what that would look like … yeah, that’s really interesting.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (24:21):

If we have a parent who, let’s say they have a third grader, fourth grader, fifth grader, or a middle schooler, right? Outside of early education. And they say, “OK, but what do I do? I’m with my kiddo; I don’t remember this math.” And they’re realizing that their anxiety may be influencing their kiddos’ disposition of mathematics, Or maybe they’re just in the midst of the battle <laugh>. What would you say to those folks, especially if it’s math that maybe they’re not comfortable with?

Marjorie Schaeffer (24:56):

One, I think we should like tone down the stress, right? Remind ourselves that it’s homework and homework feels really high-stakes, but these other outcomes are really high-stakes too, right? And so I’m really interested in the idea that can we help parents feel more comfortable about math by watching their own children teach it to them. So what’s a concept that the fourth grader actually feels really good about? And can they remind their parent how to do it? Can, together, they problem-solve the math homework? And so it’s not just on the parent to give the child the right answer. We know that’s a recipe for communicating some negative things about math. But instead, help the parent-child pair figure it out together. So what are some resources we can do? Can we look it up on the internet together? Can we write an email to the teacher together? Can we think about what are other problems that maybe we know how to do, and therefore we can use that same model here? So I want parents to feel like they are not solely responsible for it. That they can help figure it out with their child together. And so it’s a fun interaction.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (26:02):

I love that. I love that.

Dan Meyer (26:03):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s wonderful. Yeah. A conviction that I have, and I think it’s true, is that any math that we’re learning at middle school, the attraction can be dialed down to a degree that a very small child, or a parent who has a very small child’s understanding of math, can appreciate. So instead of calculation, estimation. Instead of proof, just make a claim about something. And it makes me wonder about a companion to the work that’s happening in schools that parents feel inadequate to support, that students might not want to teach their parents. But which they could both, on a daily basis, say, “Here’s a way we can engage in this at a level that is comfortable to both of us.” Just dreaming out loud here. No question asked. No response needed. I just love your work. And made me wonder about that. Can you let me know your thoughts about technology? It is very rare that we have someone on the call who is an academic and very well-versed in research, but who also is published not just in in papers and textbooks, but also in digital media. It’s consumed by lots of people. So I am trusting that you have opinions about how math looks in technology. And I wonder if you’d offer some thoughts about how it goes, right? How it goes wrong from your own eyes.

Marjorie Schaeffer (27:14):

OK. That’s a great question. I think that we need more research. I first wanna say that I think that technology has really exploded in the last few years. How children have access to technology and screen times has really changed. And what we need is high-quality research happening. That said, I think that all of the things we know from child-development research still apply to technology. And so we know that children learn best when they are engaging in interactions with their parents. And so when families can use technology together, or at least can talk about what’s happening, it can be really effective. I also think technology, especially math apps, are best at teaching concrete skills with very clear answers. So I think practicing math facts is a great use of technology. So I love that Sushi math app where you solve multiplication problems and then get to quickly pull the sushi off the cart, right? But for higher-level questions, where we’re thinking about word problems or where what we’re helping to teach students is complex thinking, apps have a harder time doing that. Because students can often figure out the answer without engaging in the thinking that we are hoping that they’ll learn. And so I think technology absolutely has a piece. I think technology is helpful for parents. I think the logistics of helping parents live their lives is a good reason to use technology. But I think we need to be conscious of what it’s replacing. And so I think a world in which we think fourth graders can learn math only from apps is not realistic. But absolutely apps can be a great supplement to what’s already happening in the classroom.

Dan Meyer (28:56):

Yeah, that’s super-helpful. We have done a lot of work in digital curriculum here at Amplify, and often face the question on a daily basis, “Should this math be digital or on paper? Should we have the students stand up and talk or type something?” And those decisions are way too crucial and way more sensitive than a lot of the app-based education gives credit to. So appreciate your perspective there.

Marjorie Schaeffer (29:22):

OK. And I don’t think there’s one answer, or one answer for all classrooms. I think it’s like always a balancing act. I do think that one of the reasons our work is successful is because the parent-child interaction. And we want parents to learn from these experiences. And I think the same thing is true for for teachers.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (29:41):

Dr. Schaeffer, thank you so much for being with us today and for sharing about your research, and again, for inviting us to reconsider ways that we can develop a more positive relationship with math. And that parent or caregiver or teacher relationship with a child, we’re seeing just how incredibly impactful that is. And I really appreciate your work and your voice on this. Thank you so much for your time.

Dan Meyer (30:07):

Thank you.

Marjorie Schaeffer (30:08):

Thank you for having me.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (30:12):

Thank you again, Dr. Schaeffer, and thank you all for listening to our conversation. You can check out the show notes for more on Dr. Schaeffer’s work and to see a link to the app that we shared about Bedtime Math.

Dan Meyer (30:25):

Please keep in touch with us on Facebook at Math Teacher Lounge Community, and on Twitter at MTLShow.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (30:32):

We would love to hear … you’ve been listening to this series; we’re dipping our toe into all these aspects of math anxiety. Is there something that you’re still wondering about? Something you wanna share about your own story with math anxiety?

Dan Meyer (30:43):

And if you haven’t already, if this is your first exposure to the Math Teacher Lounge podcast, please subscribe to Math Teacher Lounge, wherever you get your fine podcast products. And if you like what you’re hearing, please rate us! Leave us a review. You’ll help more listeners find the show.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (31:01):

And let a friend know. But you know, it’s, it’s nice and cozy here in the Lounge, right? There’s no pressure. We’re hanging out. It’s all about learning. We’re learning together. We’re glad you’re here and we want others in your community to join us in the Lounge as well. You can find more information on all of Amplify’s shows at our podcast hub. Go to amplifycom.wpengine.com/hub. Next time on Math Teacher Lounge, we’re gonna be chatting about where we are today that we weren’t a few months ago in this topic.

Dan Meyer (31:31):

We’ll be chatting about this last series about math anxiety, and trading our favorite insights and observations from the run of the season.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson (31:41):

I just love this series, Dan. And thanks, all, for listening. We really appreciate having you in the Lounge.