“Emotions are a powerful driver
of students’ learning,” says Reinhard Pekrun, a psychology professor at the University
of Munich in Germany. “Students who get positive feedback develop positive
emotions, learn better, and their enjoyment further increases. For those who
are bored or anxious, performance deteriorates, they get negative feedback,
become even more anxious or hopeless, and continue to spiral downward.”
Professor Pekrun was part of a
study called Project for the Analysis of
Learning and Achievement in Mathematics which studied 3425 students coming from
a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds during grades 5 to 9. The students
were tracked on the basis of their math test scores and other subjects’ grades,
followed by an annual survey to know how they felt about a particular subject.
The findings were thus: Highly intelligent
students obviously performed well with good grades; those students who had a
sense of pride and accomplishment and liked doing their math homework performed
even better than the former, whereas bored or anxious students had the lowest grades
in the said subjects.
The key here lies in getting rid
of the boredom or what is known as ‘math anxiety’ in a large number of kids. Developing
interactive ways (activities and games) to get them playing about with numbers
instead of mere worksheets or problems will inculcate a sense of enjoyment in
them and hopefully drive away the fear of math from their minds. After all,
math is all about positivity – a positive attitude in dealing with numbers and
their problems is but a prerequisite to enjoying math.
