We’ve heard many stories about deep, burning hatred for math, as we’re sure you probably have too. Ask anybody who works in a math teaching related profession from teachers to tutors and they’ll tell you about many students who just don’t see the connection between math and real life scenarios. Students who believe math is hard and that they will never use it and so they develop hatred for it. Stories like these are so disheartening to us, mainly because we feel like math has the ability to expand everyone’s thinking in such a positive way. Nearly everybody has the ability and right to understand math and that with good number sense and numerical fluency, nobody should hate math. Despite that we tend to hear about more math hate than we would like, we have some good news: a 2018 study commissioned by Texas Instruments and run by Research Now Group Inc., which is a digital research company, has evidence that kids do not hate math as much as much as we might think. Let’s talk about the results, which actually suggest kids look forward to math in some way or another.
To begin, the Texas Instruments survey polled 1,000 students across the United States who were middle school through high school aged. Ages 13 – 18 were their specific targets. Their target was to gauge the kids’ attitudes about math and understand what motivates them. According to the survey data, almost twice as many students report they like or love math compare to those who said they hate math or dislike it. 46% of the students said they like or love math and only 24% of them said they dislike it. The remainder of kids surveyed, which was 30%, said that they were indifferent about math. And here’s the real kicker – a whopping 68% of the students indicated that they would like math better if they understood how to apply it more to real life and/or their future.
Beyond the percentages of findings above, there were a few other outcomes that were interesting. 75% of the students reported hearing a parent or other influential adult in their life speak negatively about math with nearly half of them (44% to be exact) hearing an adult say “I hate math.” Knowing this, it’s notable that the majority of the students surveyed see that math is worth learning. 77% of the students equated success in math class in middle and high school to success in college and their future careers. It’s remarkable that students understand the importance of math, regardless of what adults think about it, however, it is one of our goals to encourage parents to stop speaking negatively about math. It generally doesn’t help motivate students who are especially struggling in math.
With all the results above, it’s also interesting to know what motivates students to want to do math. The highest motivator that the Texas Instruments survey found for students wanting to excel in math is proving that they can do something challenging. 55% of students stated that they want to prove “they can do it.” This goes hand in hand with the self-confidence we always talk about giving students here at Mathnasium of Cherry Hills, once they start to understand math better. The desire to get into good colleges was the next biggest motivator at 46%, which was closely followed by landing a better job, which came in at 40%. Lastly, when students were told that the top 20 jobs with the highest median pay call for advanced math skills, the majority of them, at 63%, stated they would work harder in math class knowing that.
What to make of all this? For one, math hatred, perhaps, doesn’t run as deep as we all might have thought. Also, it’s important to make a connection between math and real-life skills, whether it’s day to day stuff, or potential future careers, like robotics, engineering, architecture, meteorology, fashion, graphic design and more. The more kids see that math is beautiful and is behind so many careers and wonders in our society, the more they will realize they need it and possibly like it. Like with any subject, math gets harder as it progresses, but instilling good number sense and numerical fluency as early as possible gives students an advantage and prepares them to move on with more complex concepts.
The survey referred to in this blog can be sited here. It was commissioned by Texas Instruments and conducted by Research Now Group Inc. from July 17 – 23, 2018 and involved 1,007 students ages 13 and 18 years old.
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