Socially acceptable myths about math education include “people with certain gender identities have innate ability to pursue math careers” and “some people have a math brain that favors them to understand math easier.”
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A 1956 New York Times article details a report from the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, revealing that in elementary and secondary school, mathematics earned the title of “the most hated subject.”
Fast-forward to the 2020s, and in the higher education setting it is widely acknowledged that—feelings aside—mathematics underpins all other STEM disciplines. The evidence is clear that calculus often serves a gatekeeping function across STEM disciplines. The disparities in math education disproportionally affect students from historically marginalized demographics. When asked why they are leaving STEM degrees, students often report being frustrated with courses overburdened with content and with pacing structures that inhibit comprehension and reflection, according to math scholar Elaine Seymour’s testimony to the Committee on Science of the U.S. House of Representatives.
There are many social myths around the 1950s “most hated subject” that shows how math still holds the highest regard in this category. These socially acceptable myths include “boys were inherently better at learning math than girls,” “people with certain gender identities have innate ability to pursue math careers” and “some people have a math brain that favors them to understand math easier.”
These myths do not help to diversify the recruitment and retention of talented STEM students or the STEM workforce. Many efforts have been made and are still being made to overcome these challenges and empower women-identified learners to do math, to like math and to pursue math as a passion and a career.
However, an underexamined elephant in the room obstacle exists in our higher education classrooms. I recognize it as the expert-to-novice perception gap.
Through my fellowship at Rutgers University New Brunswick for the Tyler Clementi Center for Diversity Education and Bias Prevention Research 2 Practice (R2P) program, I created a book on empathetic math teaching practices titled Guidebook for Reducing the Novice-to-Expert Perception Gap in Mathematics to Increase STEM Diversity, with actionable strategies and practical teaching templates for math educators worldwide. (The YouTube video of my R2P Symposium workshop is here.)
Recognizing the Perception Gap
The way an expert (a math professor) views math content is different than the way a novice (a math student) perceives the same content.
In other words, my students in an introductory calculus course do not see calculus problems the same way I see them. If a math instructor is not mindful or even aware of the students’ novice status, they may not understand why the students are not grasping the material. And when the instruction is too fast-paced, not providing students sufficient brain time to carefully process the delivered content, learners may be hesitant to ask questions, or may not speak up.
This obstacle could simply be rooted in the lack of awareness of this perception gap by the math content expert. After all, the same content is easily understood by the math professor, while it will not be as easily understood by students with novice status.
A visual representation of this perception gap can be seen below from a meme that shows a math classroom where the professor delivering the content is writing on the board comfortably while the students behind the professor seem to be disconnected from the professor’s reality and compare this “learning” experience to watching a Chinese-language movie without subtitles.
Math-related memes tend to universally portray the subject as difficult.
Once an Expert Is Not Always an Expert
In my R2P fellowship presentation, the first activity I designed and facilitated was about making experts mindful of their novice status in a different domain.
I started the activity by sharing my personal experience of taking dance lessons with my husband as a novice dancer. It turned out it was not as easy as I expected. I would say my physicist husband better adapted to the dance instructor’s expectations than I did, as I really struggled to remember the dance moves and how to actually apply what I learned. The fact that I did not practice much also slowed my dance performance as I started to think my husband has an innate ability (!) to dance. In fact, learning how to dance the samba, the cha-cha and the tango was not like doing calculus for me.
This experience enabled me to connect to my novice self in dancing at a personal level and to my students’ novice status in my introductory calculus courses on a professional level. I started to see the math content from a different angle as I became more aware of the demanding nature of math, which I now explicitly share in my instruction.
3 C’s for an Empathetic Math Instruction Framework
The insights I received from an all-women student panel was very valuable, as students advocated for their learning and shared their experiences about joyful moments of math learning while communicating their personal suggestions on how to make math classrooms more empathetic, welcoming and inclusive.
I listened to the experts in this field as I consider these women learners the experts in their own math learning experiences ranging from high school math to first-year precalculus and calculus courses. The student panel takeaways centered around the three common themes (three C’s) as a compassionate and connected community for a higher ed math classroom culture.
The compassion is exhibited when the math expert becomes more aware of this perception gap and teaches novice students in a compassionate way. If the content expert is not aware of this gap, then memes like the one above will continue to circulate on social media and math will continue to be the source of gender stereotypes, misunderstandings and the status of most hated subject.
An expert in any discipline was once a novice in that same discipline. A connected community in a learning atmosphere is cultivated when the professor reminds students that they are a community of learners who share the same goal of succeeding in the course and intentionally designs learning activities to consistently develop and support this connected community. After all, no student takes a course with the goal of failing. While many colleges strive to come up with innovative ways to combat “The New Plague on Campus: Loneliness,” as it was called in a November 2023 Inside Higher Ed article, this deliberate teaching practice can also help students who struggle with loneliness.
As we, student-facing faculty, teach this semester, let us become more compassionate toward our students’ novice status, and let us create a community of learners with the principles of compassion and connection in our higher education math classrooms. If you wonder where to start, here are three actionable strategies to consider when teaching math:
- Creating judgment-free math learning spaces by valuing learning from one’s mistakes. This could be facilitated in the form of exam reflections and corrections and even a Festival of Errors. I just integrated the festival of errors learning activity into my summer 2024 Calculus I course, with students presenting their quiz mistakes by comparing their solutions with my worked-out, handwritten solutions. The types of mistakes were grouped into three or four categories when students noticed their peers also made and shared the same mistakes.
- Developing engaging learning activities to encourage student discourse and community-building, such as “speak up” points, as extra credit for students who ask questions for clarifications as they practice advocating for their own learning and progress.
- Showing empathy toward the students’ novice status by being mindful of the perception gap such as incorporating a wait time after explaining a math problem to enable students process this novel information for them.
For brave professors, I also recommend learning about and talking about the cognitive bias curse of knowledge, as we are cursed with our accumulated math knowledge, which may cause a disconnect with students’ novice status. When I explicitly mention this to my students and ask them to speak up to explain what they don’t understand, I notice students seem to be very surprised to hear my transparency and they are more willing to actively participate in class.