AN INTERVENTION TO LESSEN GEOSCIENCE MAJOR MATH ANXIETY

As Earth and environmental fields become more data-driven, math and quantitative skills an essential part of a scientist’s tool kit. However, there are many barriers that can keep students from succeeding, and even enrolling, in math and math-heavy courses. One barrier that can hold students back is math anxiety, which can range from moderate to extreme fear, and occasionally physical pain, associated with anticipating or performing mathematical tasks. High levels of math anxiety have been tied to students taking lower levels of math and less quantitatively-challenging courses, impacting educational and career choices.

Previous studies have shown that rewording math-based problems to include language that de-emphasizes the quantitative elements can work to reduce high levels of anxiety; which can be as simple as using “problem-solving ability” instead of “math ability” on an assessment. In this study, a similar intervention was used in a small, undergraduate geoscience program. Questions were rephrased to downplay the quantitative elements and focus the language more around students’ geoscience background. As an example from a Geomorphology homework, the control questions contained math-anxiety triggering words, such as “calculate the Factor of Safety,” whereas the intervention question asked students to “provide evidence for slope failure.” Students were expected to complete the problems in similar fashion by showing their quantitative work using given equations, whether answering the treatment or control questions.

Math anxiety has been assessed using the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Rating Scale (AMARS) survey. Students were surveyed both the first and last week of the course, and course grades and demographic information were also collected. In addition to the major courses, non-majors in large general-education courses were also surveyed for their math anxiety levels, with no intervention. Ultimately, students in the intervention major courses were statistically more likely to have a drop in their math anxiety compared to students in the control courses. In a geoscience classroom, rephrasing quantitative questions to focus more on geoscience knowledge versus the quantitative task appears to be a viable way to lower math anxiety while still building students’ quantitative skills.