Others explained how they decided they weren’t a “math person” during these time-pressured moments and lost interest in the subject.įirst-person testimonials are sufficient evidence for some that timed tests are harmful. ![]() I worry about finishing, and I can’t remember it even if I do know it. I do the ones I know, but then I get stressed that I’m not thinking fast enough and forget. “If I am timed, I get nervous and forget everything. Interview excerpts like this one from a 1999 study of college students who were training to become math teachers are typical: What does exist are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of studies that document the stories of people who describe how much they hated timed tests. Ideally, you would need to design a multi-year study - where some children were randomly given speed drills and others not, but were all taught the same way - and see what their math achievement and math anxiety levels were at the end of high school. There’s evidence for and against even within studies. It’s also complicated to disentangle whether timed tests are making matters worse for children who already have math anxiety from other causes. Distinguishing productive adrenaline rush from detrimental anxiety isn’t easy. Math anxiety is difficult to measure, and even children who enjoy timed drills may experience an elevated heart rate, an aspect of anxiety, as they race through a sheet of sums. The Science of Math group could find only two experimental studies that have attempted to test the hypothesis and neither concluded that tests produce anxiety. I interviewed more than a half dozen math experts who confirmed there aren’t well-designed experiments that prove timed tests cause math anxiety. There isn’t much dispute about the lack of empirical evidence. After looking at the research, I think the evidence is not quite as clear as the Science of Math group indicates. A few readers contacted me after I first wrote about the Science of Math movement earlier in May 2023, urging me to look at the group’s claims about timed tests. The researchers built an entire webpage to set the record straight and devoted a section of a 2022 paper to explaining why it’s a myth that timed tests cause anxiety. This long-running debate captured my attention again because a group of more than a dozen education researchers, who founded an organization they call the “ Science of Math,” declared that the stopwatch skeptics are wrong. But advocates insist that these tests, which last one to five minutes, help children memorize math facts, freeing up their brains to tackle more challenging math problems. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urges teachers to “ avoid” timed tests. Critics say these timed drills aren’t useful and instead provoke math anxiety in many children. Should teachers pull out their stopwatches and administer one-page worksheets in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? Speed drills are such a routine part of the weekly rhythms of many math classrooms that they’re often called Mad Minute Mondays.
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