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Young World
Anxious moments
Worrying about how you'll perform on a math test may actually contribute to a lower test score say U.S. researchers. Math anxiety can sap the brain's limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems, said Mark Ashcraft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who studies the problem. "It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person's working memory," said Ashcraft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. Ashcraft said while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small fraction of a person's working memory, harder computations require much more. Worrying about math takes up a large chunk of a person's working memory stores as well, spelling disaster for the anxious student who is taking a high-stakes test. Stress about how one does on tests like college entrance exams can make even good math students choke.
Ashcraft says people who manage to overcome math anxiety have completely normal math proficiency.
COMPLIED BY NIMI KURIAN
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