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Directions: Read the following three passages. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

What do We Know About “Mathephobia”

Mathematician Mary de Lellis Gough, who often observed her struggling students fail to work out mathematical problems, coined the term ‘mathephobia’ in 1953. She described it as “a disease that proves fatal before its presence is detected”. Other experts have defined it as “the panic, helplessness and mental disorganization that arises among some people when they are required to solve a mathematical problem” and “a general fear of contact with mathematics”.

Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist and her colleagues of Barnard College in New York have shown that math anxiety can start as soon as we enter formal schooling. “Math is one of the first places in school in western cultures where we really learn about whether we got something right or wrong, and are exposed to being evaluated in timed tests.”

Girls may be more prone to it than boys. Primary school teachers often have high levels of math anxiety, says Beilock, and in the US and elsewhere, they are mostly female. Since young children tend to identify with adults of the same gender, this means girls are more likely to pick up math anxiety from their female teachers. Having a female teacher with math anxiety makes girls more likely to believe gendered stereotypes about math, leading to poorer achievement.

“Once you have it, it can be self-lasting. Worrying about it can make it worse.” says Beilock, whose study of children between the ages of five and eight suggests math anxiety might weaken performance by burdening working memory. “As our ability to focus limited, our attention gets divided when we do more than one task at a time.” she says. “If you’re worried about having to do math, you may have an internal monologue saying you can’t do this and at the same time you’re trying to calculate numbers.”

When people have math anxiety, they tend to avoid the subject, as researchers from 2019 show. But since math builds on itself, avoiding it makes it harder to catch up. “Math is foundational. If you miss a certain idea, it’s harder to learn the next one.” says Darcy Hallett. “And then you can fall behind, which might make math more of a targeted anxiety compared to other topics.”

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