Do Timed Math Tests Cause Anxiety? No — But Dr. Jo Boaler Has Been Claiming They Do

Do timed math tests cause anxiety?

One of the leading math educators in the United States has been saying this for years.

Dr.

Jo Bowler of Stanford, who was one of the main architects of the California Mathematics Framework, has been saying for years that timed tests cause math anxiety.

She's been saying that unambiguously.

And last week, she was accused in a 100-page anonymously submitted formal complaint of misusing research citations.

She was misapplying research and saying that it said things that it did not say.

And in one case, one of the authors of one of the studies that she cited told her to knock it off.

Said, my study did not study this at all.

It does not say what you were saying it says.

Please stop saying that my research has shown that timed math tests cause anxiety.

They were studying something else entirely.

And there are 52 instances of citation misconduct in these allegations.

And I wanted to take just a minute to talk about what the actual scientific evidence says about math and anxiety.

And first of all, we've got to understand math anxiety is a real thing.

Lots of people are anxious about math.

People who do not do well in math tend to be more anxious about it.

And being more anxious about math tends to inhibit your performance in math.

So there's this idea going around that is kind of intuitive to a lot of people.

that math causes anxiety and that timed math tests especially are bad for students because they trigger anxiety.

And what we have to understand is that this is an empirical question.

Like, we can study this, and lots of people, it turns out, have been studying this, and it is false.

There is no evidence that math tests cause anxiety.

And you might be thinking, well, how can math anxiety be real and yet timed math tests don't cause anxiety?

Well, like, anxiety...

is not necessarily caused by school, right?

Anxiety can exist for a number of different reasons, and I'll give you some sources that go into some of the contributors to anxiety.

But for our purposes as educators, we have to examine the evidence about the question of whether what we're doing pedagogically causes anxiety.

And the answer there is no.

Giving timed math tests does not cause anxiety, and it is good for students.

The evidence is unambiguous that timed math activities for certain purposes, obviously we shouldn't you know, give students too little time to do their work.

But there are specific situations where speed matters, where fluency matters, right?

Like if you're a reader, but you can only read 10 words per minute, you're not really a very good reader.

Like fluency matters.

If you're a runner, but you can only run half a mile an hour, like you're not a very good runner.

Fluency matters, especially with basic math facts.

And there's been tons and tons of research about this.

So I'll refer you to a podcast by Dr.

Anna Stocki, who is a Canadian researcher who has been looking into this for a very long time.

And the evidence is very clear.

Math tests do not cause anxiety.

Obviously, if we have students who have clinical levels of anxiety, we might need to do some accommodations for them, give them more time.

But in general, this idea that we can't give any kind of time tests on multiplication facts or anything like that because it's going to trigger anxiety is just false.

Let me know what you think.