book on math anxiety

Sheila Tobias first wrote Overcoming Math Anxiety in 1978. In her 1994 updated version, she expands her analysis of the attitude and approach variables that interfere with students' performance.

Math Anxiety

Sheila Tobias has interviewed hundreds of people who have math anxiety. They can all remember the moment when they began to doubt that they had what it takes to learn math. In some cases, it was because someone had told them girls don't do math or blacks don't become engineers. Others came to the conclusion that they would either be good with numbers or with words but that they could not be good with both. Because our American culture is ambivalent about mathematicians' role models, some students decided they did not want to enter the field. Besides, math seemed dreary, never fun.

None of these widespread assumptions are true. First, if there are still few females and blacks in the top tiers of working mathematicians and scientists, it is not because they are genetically inferior; it is because social and institutional barriers exist that are only now slowly disappearing. Second, while some writers do not like math and some mathematicians do not like to write, no evidence exists, whatsoever, that writing ability and mathematics ability are mutually exclusive. In fact, people who show high capability on both the mathematical and verbal sections of the SAT are more likely to succeed in math than those who have a severely skewed score, strong only in quantitative skills. And, finally, while elementary mathematics may indeed be repetitive, it is a skill that must be practiced to get to the creative part later on.

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