For many adults, mathematics is that ‘unfinished business’, let alone for many students who are faced with anxiety and disappointment at the dreaded exams.
Counting on your fingers, not understanding how to solve arithmetic problems, not remembering the rules and procedures, getting the math wrong… these are some of the problems that can be found. We provide you with some tricks to try not to choke mathematics or that, if you are good at it, it may be your best skill.
1. Improve your spatial skills : Yi-Ling Cheng and Kelly S. Mix have recently published (2014) that training in a task of ‘mental rotation’ of objects improved the calculation ability of children between 6 and 8 years old. A single session and the training group improved significantly on gap-filling operations, such as 8 + __ = 12.
2. Gesticulate when you analyze the instructions : A new article that appeared in the journal Psychological Science (2014) explains how children who were trained to make gestures to represent abstract ideas contained in mathematical problems learned better to solve those problems and other different ones, generalizing said learning.
3. Train your working memory and executive functions : The work published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 2014 shows how working memory is important not only to explain some difficulties with mathematics, such as solving word problems, but also to take advantage of a training dedicated to improving the strategies of the participants.
4. Controls anxiety about mathematics : According to Sharifah NS Wahid and his collaborators (2014), the mathematical performance of a group of university students was lower the higher their level of anxiety before mathematics. The authors highlight the importance of motivating students and developing their self-confidence in relation to this subject.
5. Play chess : It seems, according to a recent scientific review published in Frontiers in Psychology (2014), that playing chess could be a good way to stimulate some of those mental functions that are also activated in mathematical tasks, such as understanding, analytical skills or inductive reasoning.
We know that it is not easy but also that it is not impossible to be better in mathematics, so get going and above all, do not lose your temper along the way.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
