Mathematical Resilience: Helping Students With Math Anxiety

A pop quiz, a raised hand nobody uses, a child who says “I’m just not a maths person” before the lesson has even started — math anxiety rarely looks dramatic in the classroom, which is exactly why it goes unaddressed. OECD’s 2022 PISA survey found that around 40% of students report feeling nervous, helpless or anxious while solving maths problems or doing maths homework, and that this anxiety has risen sharply across most participating countries since 2012.

This course is led by Dr. Vahap Yorgun, a psychological counsellor who has focused his research and clinical practice on math anxiety since 2020, and who runs an intervention programme he developed for middle and high school students. Across five days, participants learn to recognise the affective, behavioural and physiological signs of math anxiety, understand where it comes from, and apply a set of classroom-ready techniques to help students move out of it — then leave with a personal action plan for their own school.

Math anxiety is not simply “not liking maths” — it is a measurable disruption to how the brain processes mathematical tasks. Ashcraft and Kirk’s widely cited study found that students with high math anxiety have a smaller usable working-memory capacity when doing maths under pressure, which is part of why anxious students often make more errors and work more slowly, independent of their actual mathematical ability. Understanding that distinction — a performance problem caused by anxiety, not a lack of skill — is the starting point the course builds from on Day 1.

The course draws on the idea of mathematical resilience, developed by Sue Johnston-Wilder and Clare Lee, which frames the goal not as eliminating discomfort with maths altogether but as helping students recognise when they have moved from a comfortable “safety zone” into a “danger zone” where they shut down — and giving them tools to work instead in a manageable “growth zone” where challenge is present but does not trigger avoidance. That distinction sits behind the growth-mindset and self-regulation techniques introduced later in the week.

Days 1 and 2 build the diagnostic foundation: what math anxiety looks like in a classroom, and the environmental and pedagogical factors — timed testing, public correction, inherited teacher anxiety about the subject — that tend to trigger or worsen it. From Day 3 onward, the course moves into intervention: concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) teaching sequences, structured “math talk”, low-stakes error analysis, and — on Day 4 — growth-mindset and mindfulness-based techniques that give students a way to regulate their own response in the moment. Day 5 turns all of it into a plan: participants leave with a personalised, multi-technique implementation plan for their own classroom and school.