Individualized math lessons improved kids’ arithmetic
performance and made them feel more comfortable with the subject.
Anxiety about doing math problems can be
relieved with a one-on-one math tutoring program, according to a new study from
the Stanford University School of Medicine. The tutoring fixed
abnormal responses in the brain’s fear circuits.
The study, published Sept. 9 in The
Journal of Neuroscience, is the first to document an effective treatment
for math anxiety in children.
“The most exciting aspect of our findings is
that cognitive tutoring not only improves performance, but is also
anxiety-reducing,” said the study’s senior author, Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and
behavioral sciences. “It was surprising that we could, in fact, get remediation
of math anxiety.”
Even if they are good at math, many children
feel anxious about doing math problems. For some, the anxiety persists
throughout life, discouraging them from pursuing advanced math and science classes
as well as careers that rely on mathematical expertise. Yet almost no attention
has been paid to how to help alleviate this problem.
“Math anxiety has been under the radar,” said
the study’s lead author, research associate Kaustubh Supekar, PhD.
“People think it will just go away, but for many children and adults, it
doesn’t.”
Measuring math anxiety
The new research was based on the idea that
the principles of exposure-based therapy for treating phobias might also apply
to alleviation of math anxiety. Phobias, such as the fear of spiders, can be
relieved in affected individuals by repeatedly exposing them in a safe
environment to the thing they fear.
The new study included 46 children in third
grade. Before receiving tutoring, each child took a test that assessed his or
her level of math anxiety. The children were divided into two groups — one with
high math anxiety, the other with low math anxiety — based on whether their
math anxiety scores fell above or below the median score for all of the
children. They also completed standard neuropsychological assessments and were
tested on simple addition problems while having their brains scanned via
functional magnetic resonance imaging. The brain scans of the children with
high levels of math anxiety showed activation in the brain’s fear circuits and
so-called “fear center,” or amygdala, before tutoring, replicating a finding
that Menon and colleagues published in 2012.
People think it will just go
away, but for many children and adults, it doesn’t.
After the first fMRI scan, children
participated in an intensive, eight-week tutoring program consisting of 22
lessons involving addition and subtraction problems. Tutors gave the lessons to
each child individually. After tutoring, the math anxiety test and fMRI scans
were repeated.
All of the children performed better on
addition and subtraction problems after tutoring. The children who started the
study with high levels of math anxiety had reduced anxiety after tutoring,
while those in the low-math-anxiety group had no change in their anxiety
levels.
Anxiety alleviated
After tutoring, the fear circuits and
amygdala were no longer activated in children who had begun the study with high
math anxiety, confirming that tutoring ameliorated the anxiety itself, rather
than providing the kids with a coping mechanism that relies on other brain
circuits.
“It’s reassuring that we could actually help
these children reduce anxiety by mere exposure to problems,” Supekar said.
The researchers plan to conduct future
studies to figure out what aspects of the one-on-one tutoring were helpful.
Menon wants to test whether the interaction between tutors and students in a
social context plays a role, or whether computerized tutoring can result in the
same benefits and brain circuit changes.
“The tutoring has a standard protocol, but is
also personalized,” said Menon, who holds the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols,
MD, Professorship. “If a child is stuck at a particular concept, the tutor
tries to get the child beyond the bottleneck in a non-negative, encouraging
way.” Because the tutoring happens one-on-one, children do not have the
opportunity to feel fearful about not performing as well as their peers, which
may also help. “We need more research to understand that,” Menon added.
The researchers also want to investigate
whether the anxiety-reducing effects of tutoring will persist as children move
on to learning more complex problem-solving skills.
Other Stanford-affiliated authors of the
study are postdoctoral scholars Teresa Iuculano, PhD, and Lang Chen, PhD. Menon is a member of the Stanford
Child Health Research Institute.
The research was supported by the National
Institutes of Health (grants HD059205 and HD047520), the National
Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and by an Atherton
Investigator award.
Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences also supported the work.
Source | http://med.stanford.edu/
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