Scared of science? Anxiety creates challenges for students studying STEM

When faced with an equation, some people just want to run the other way. Anyone with math anxiety or science anxiety knows that the condition makes it harder to study the STEM fields. Math anxiety not only negatively affects how people solve problems, but it is also associated with taking fewer math classes and shying away from STEM-related careers. Conversely, strong spatial skills — like the kind developed by learning American Sign Language — are linked to STEM success.

Dr. Rachel Pizzie, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, wanted to find out which factor is more powerful. “People often have a fixed mindset when it comes to spatial skills. They think you have it or you don’t,” she explains. “But we have an interesting population who have built spatial skills through spatial language.”

So she created a study that looked at spatial skills and interest in studying STEM among deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing adults who have experience with sign language. The results showed that anxiety still appears to have the biggest impact for all groups. Participants with higher levels of math and science anxiety performed worse on a test of spatial skills and had the least interest in studying STEM.

Pizzie, along with graduate students Rachel Marie Sortino, Christina Eun-Young Kim, and Rachel Inghram, published these findings July 9 in npj Science of Learning. “Math anxiety and science anxiety are associated with spatial cognition and STEM interest in deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people” details how they investigated these relationships through questionnaires and a task that asked participants whether pairs of images could be rotated to be identical.

“We asked about language background, how much ASL experience they have, and their level of comfort with ASL,” Pizzie says. “And we looked at other spatial factors, like how much they apply spatial skills and use them to think about the world.” None of these differences appeared to have as much of an impact as math and science anxiety.

Pizzie’s takeaway from this data is that there is a significant obstacle preventing many people from pursuing STEM fields. “We need to come up with accessible ways to address math anxiety and science anxiety for students to have success,” she says.

Learning more about math anxiety

Earlier this year, Visual Language & Visual Learning (VL2) released a research brief on understanding math anxiety authored by Sortino, Kim, Casey Spelman, Dr. Bradley White, and Pizzie. It explores how this negative emotional response can make people feel stressed and overwhelmed, which leads to a vicious cycle of avoidance and more anxiety. Although most of the research in this area has focused on hearing people, the brief notes that recent studies suggest that deaf and hard of hearing students have similar experiences.

In 2023, Dr. Pizzie published research conducted in public high school math classrooms exploring how to address math anxiety. “Strategies for remediating the impact of math anxiety on high school math performance” notes that one way to help students is to teach them “cognitive reappraisal,” a technique that encourages you to reframe an anxious situation. As the brief explains, “A student experiencing stress like a fast heartbeat may think, ‘these feelings are my body’s way of telling me it’s ready to deal with a challenge. This stress can help me deal with any challenges that come my way!’”

Another strategy is to focus on study skills, such as reviewing with flash cards and sample questions. “When we do structured discussions with students, they often feel stuck when they try to study for math and science classes,” Pizzie says. “They reread the chapter or their notes. Instead, they should do a practice quiz, look at what they did wrong and try it again.” In the 2023 study, this change led to significantly higher grades for students with high math anxiety. 

The VL2 research brief offers additional resources for caregivers, educators, and anyone struggling with math anxiety.

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