How Teachers Can Help Students Defeat Their Fear of Maths?

Teachers experience many issues in the classroom: an extensive range of aptitudes, deficiency of support or materials, big classroom sizes, time limitations, and more. But possibly one of the strenuous barriers is the fear of mathematics in students. Maths-phobia can simply convert into students betraying anxiety, a lack of approach, and even confidence issues.

A study has found that maths anxiety is connected to inferior maths performance, and can make enlightening the subject a daily pain. So how can teachers guide students to combat their fear of maths? How can they implant excitement in a subject that so many students get frightened of?

Build Confidence

Unsurprisingly, confidence is key in students’ agitation toward the maths subject. Earlier adverse incidents with the subject can take it to a bad and fatalistic attitude. To defeat this, as a teacher you should offer students with daily confidence-building practices that look energizing and entitle all students to perform well in maths subjects and prepare for International Maths Olympiad Challenge. This enhancement in confidence and self-esteem can reduce anxiety and fear, as students feel more and more competent and inspired.

Nourish Students’ Basic Skills

Associated closely with building confidence is bracing students’ basic numerical competency. Providing students chances to practice and upgrade critical skills for quantitative flow is necessary: when students don’t have the fundamental skills at hand, their working capabilities are pushed, which can be both disturbing and discouraging. It would help if you got students to practice mental maths and basic maths skills daily, incorporating them into games, quizzes, maths fun tests, maths Olympiad preparation, and warm-up activities.

Use Step-By-Step Process

There is proof that even intellectual maths students can experience burden and be overwhelmed when there are too many details at once and insufficient time to practice. It’s a better idea to part the resources into small exercises so that the maths olympiad students are able to understand and be adept at one step before continuing to the next.

Develop a Growth Mindset

Studies and publications on ‘growth mindset’ – the trust that our abilities can be advanced– have lightened up the role of student endeavor and self-awareness and acquired a significant foundation in educational practice. Motivating maths students to take challenges and have a growth mindset is inspiring. By offering students maths sample papers that get tough, you can show them they can overcome any obstacle through concentration and regular practice.

Attitude of Teachers

Last but surely not least, a teacher’s approach toward teaching mathematics can greatly impact students’ lives. Just as we request teachers to display a love of reading when it is about literature, we must also uplift maths teachers to exhibit excitement toward maths teaching. Teachers are the main pillars in building a positive and exciting learning atmosphere, such as by introducing maths puzzles and games into simplifications and examples.

Conclusion

By showing excitement and appreciation for mathematics, teachers can also develop a healthy relationship with the students to make them comfortable learning maths. And if teachers aren’t entirely comfortable with students themselves, a better recommendation is to invest in personal development. Learning how to teach maths subjects and connect students in ways that develop understanding capabilities can assist in reducing maths anxiety in both students and teachers.


How Can You Motivate Students in Mathematics

Inspiring students to be exuberantly responsive is one of the most significant aspects of mathematics directions and a serious aspect of any curriculum. Successful teachers focus attentively on the less interested or weak students and the intelligent ones. Here are a few ways—based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—that can come into action to inspire primary and secondary school students in maths preparation.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation includes advantages that occur outside the student’s dominance. These may incorporate lucrative token rewards for top performance, escape “punishment” for accomplishing good, compliments for good work, and so on.

Although, many students show intrinsic motivation in their preference to understand a session or logic (task-related), to surpass others (ego-related), or to influence others. The ultimate aim gets to the barrier between intrinsic and extrinsic.

Strategies for Increasing Student Motivation in Math

Call attention to a gap in students’ skills: Disclosing to students a difference in their understanding abilities maximizes their desire to learn more. For example, you may present a few usual exercises or tasks that imply familiar circumstances, followed by exercises that include unfamiliar situations on the same maths topic. The more fiercely you find the gap in understanding, the more fruitful the motivation.

Display continuous achievement: Closely connected to the preceding technique is having students cherish a logical order of concepts. This varies from the earlier process in that it relies on students’ aspirations to increase, not complete, their knowledge skills. One instance of a sequential achievement method is how quadrilaterals differ from one to another from the point of view of
their properties.

Give a challenge: When students are challenged rationally, they respond with enthusiasm and attentiveness. Proper care must be taken in opting for the challenge for students like International Maths Olympiad Challenge offers maths test opportunities to students who want to prepare for the maths Olympiad from around the world. The maths challenge must lead into the curriculum and be within reach of the student’s abilities and grades.

Point out the usefulness of a topic: Introduce a practical implementation of genuine interest to the class at the start of a topic. For instance, in high school geometry, a student could be asked to find the diameter of a plate where all the relevant detail they have is a plate section smaller than a semicircle. The activity selected should be organized and easiest to motivate the students.

Use entertaining mathematics: Recreational motivation includes games, quizzes, contests, or puzzles. In addition to being chosen for their specific motivational advantage, these activities must be appropriate and uncomplicated. Effective implementation of this process will let students complete the recreation. Moreover, the fun and excitement that these recreational references create should be handled carefully.

Conclusion

Mathematics teachers must acknowledge the fundamental motives already exist in their learners or students who prepare hard to compete in International Maths Challenge. The teacher can then use these methods of motivation to increase engagement and improve the success rate of the teaching process. Utilizing student motivations and abilities can lead to the development of artificial mathematical problems and situations.