Bongekile Macupe
MATHEMATICS teachers need to go back to the drawing board with basic maths to build pupil’s confidence and master the subject.
So say experts responding to a University of Free State study that revealed that rural high school pupils felt anxiety doing maths.
The study, “Do rural high school learners experience mathematics anxiety in academic settings?” – was published in the SA Journal of Education last month.
It looked at 18 rural high schools in the Free State and found that almost all of the 403 pupils who participated experienced maths anxiety.
This occurred whether writing exams, doing assignments or when receiving their assignment marks.
Even the use of a calculator doesn’t help, as “the use of a calculator evokes more anxiety”, the study found.
However, education psychologist Professor Kobus Maree
said, “If a learner doesn’t have support from Grade 1, maths will be the very first subject to suffer.”
He said rural children didn’t have role models, textbooks or people to give them support.
Also, the widening gap between the “have nots and haves” plays a big role in the failure of pupils.
“How can you sit in an informal settlement and be expected to do the same sum as someone in Sandton?” he asked.
All pupils needed food and a secure environment, he added.
“We need to find out what causes learners to feel anxiety. We need to find out what goes on in our homes.”
Maree said it was important for teachers to go back to teaching basic maths. The subject could be made fun, exciting and inviting, but first “the simple basics have to be mastered”.
Pupils need intelligent and stable teachers that “will not shout at learners if they get a sum wrong”.
The president of the Association for Mathematics Education of SA, Alwyn Olivier, said teachers needed to build pupils’ confidence and self-worth. They should give pupils feedback to help them understand the problem. Teachers should make the pupils feel they have the ability to achieve and that would help solve problems.
The study found anxiety could “develop as a result of the learners’ prior negative experiences of learning mathematics in the classroom or at home”.
It describes the feeling as: “panic, helplessness, mental paralysis and disorganisation that arise among some individuals when they are required to solve a problem of a mathematical nature”.
The study says maths anxiety can lead pupils to develop behaviour problems to “escape mathematics lessons and work”.
It also found that it hampers memorising ability. “Intrusive thoughts and worries take the focus away from the mathematics task at hand,” the study finds.
Maree stresses that it is important to reduce mathematics anxiety among pupils. But he believes the focus should be on finding the level of mathematics anxiety at rural, township and affluent schools and determine what is causing it.
“We need to do deep probing into the issue,” he said.
He said it was about time the country produced good “black students”.
“It is unacceptable that the majority of pupils who pass come from white schools,” he said. It was about time that every teacher showed willingness to go and teach in a rural or township school to improve the quality of education, he added.