Curios of the week #56

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week was the last week of term and there has been plenty going on. I am looking forward to a little rest and recuperation over Easter before heading to London with Jen, Clarendon’s principal, to complete some interviews. I am hoping there will be no disruption to Curios output but I cannot guarantee that.

On the subject of recruitment and interviews, it is worth reminding you all that expressions of interest for work at Ballarat Clarendon College are always open. You can follow this link.

This week’s Curios include maths anxiety, a mathematician’s lament, an overdue report and much more.

Tweet Post of the week

The Jo Boaler story has rolled on into another week, despite no new developments. An outfit called Pirate Wires has published an article by Sanjana Friedman that gives a brief synopsis of the whole tale and not just the recent complaint.

Notably, Bond villain billionaire Elon Musk has now picked up on this.

As I mentioned last week, one of my Substack posts is referenced in evidence in the anonymous complaint to Stanford that sparked this recent interest in the veracity of Boaler’s work. So, it all feels a bit weird.

Test anxiety of the week

One of the claims Jo Boaler has made is of a link between timed tests and maths anxiety. I investigated the original claim and came to a citation dead end. In response to an article last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Boaler offered additional references to support the claim and it is my analysis of these references that is referenced in the complaint to Stanford.

It is important to note that this argument is about the evidence that supports the claim, not the claim itself. I am prepared to accept that under some circumstances, timed tests could make students anxious, although I’m not sure this would translate into the supposedly more generalised anxiety about maths that the term ‘maths anxiety’ is meant to capture. My view, based on my experience as a maths teacher is that other factors also affect test anxiety and that there are measures we can put in place to make students less anxious about testing.

One of these measures is to assure students that the testing is low-stakes. I often say something along the lines of, “This assessment is to help me figure out what I have taught well and what I haven’t done such a good job with and will need to revisit with you.” Not only is this accurate, it sidelines a student’s ego.

However, even under these circumstances, testing can cause some anxiety. A new paper perhaps sheds light on why. Stefanie De Jonge and colleagues followed 253 Belgian secondary school students for a semester and looked for correlations between test anxiety and factors that might affect test anxiety. A key factor is ‘competence frustration’. Essentially, we like to feel competent and become anxious when we do not. As the authors suggest: