Sheila Tobias, associate provost of Wesleyan University, is a feminist with an interesting theory about why women fail to get certain kinds of jobs. Says she: "I had been deeply concerned with occupational segregation, the tracking of women into 'soft' fields that were considered appropriate for them. When I listened to adult women discussing going back to work, they kept talking about 'working with people.' What they were all avoiding, I realized, was anything based on mathematics. It just went click." A number of studies by educators have substantiated what Tobias has named "math anxiety." Among the findings:
> Sociologist Lucy Sells, in a 1973 survey at Berkeley, discovered that 57% of male first-year students had taken four years of high school math, while only 8% of females had done so. As a result, 92% of freshmen women could major in only five out of 20 available fields, since calculus was a requirement for the other 15. Sells' charge: "Nobody told girls that they couldn't get jobs in the real world unless they knew math."
> Lynn Fox, an educator who studied precocious math students for her doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University, found that "there are more negative stereotypes for math-gifted girls than boys," and that mathematically apt girls "seem more willing to sacrifice intellectual stimulation to social stimulation." Other studies have confirmed that girls' interest in math plummets at around age twelve, when adolescence makes them more aware of social roles.
"We need to destroy this mystification of math," says Sociologist Sells, and a few colleges are beginning to do just that. Not surprisingly, Wesleyan is among the leaders. Its math clinic, headed by Tobias, was founded in the fall of 1975 and relies heavily on psychological counseling. Initially, students—including men with so-called math blocks—are interviewed so that their "confidence level" can be discussed. Then students have a choice: an intensive review of high school math or participation in noncredit workshops, both with regular individual counseling.
Wellesley College, meanwhile, is using a different approach. Its "Discovery Course in Elementary Math and Its Application," now in its third semester, peddles soft-core math, or math disguised as games. Sample puzzle: the 15 or so students, seated in a circle, are given a map and told to color each country, using as few colors as possible and making sure that the same color is not used for adjacent countries (the purpose: to learn network theory). Says Alice Schafer, the program's director: "The goal of the students is to solve the problem, while that of the instructors is to help the students discover the mathematical structure behind the problem."
Both courses, which are financed by the federal Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, have impressed students. Wellesley's course, for example, is oversubscribed and most of its "graduates" have subsequently braved higher-level math, statistics or economics. At a third innovator, Mills College in California, a pre-calculus program that stresses the necessity of math for many careers has helped make math the most popular subject among the 850 women undergraduates.
> Sociologist Lucy Sells, in a 1973 survey at Berkeley, discovered that 57% of male first-year students had taken four years of high school math, while only 8% of females had done so. As a result, 92% of freshmen women could major in only five out of 20 available fields, since calculus was a requirement for the other 15. Sells' charge: "Nobody told girls that they couldn't get jobs in the real world unless they knew math."
> Lynn Fox, an educator who studied precocious math students for her doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University, found that "there are more negative stereotypes for math-gifted girls than boys," and that mathematically apt girls "seem more willing to sacrifice intellectual stimulation to social stimulation." Other studies have confirmed that girls' interest in math plummets at around age twelve, when adolescence makes them more aware of social roles.
"We need to destroy this mystification of math," says Sociologist Sells, and a few colleges are beginning to do just that. Not surprisingly, Wesleyan is among the leaders. Its math clinic, headed by Tobias, was founded in the fall of 1975 and relies heavily on psychological counseling. Initially, students—including men with so-called math blocks—are interviewed so that their "confidence level" can be discussed. Then students have a choice: an intensive review of high school math or participation in noncredit workshops, both with regular individual counseling.
Wellesley College, meanwhile, is using a different approach. Its "Discovery Course in Elementary Math and Its Application," now in its third semester, peddles soft-core math, or math disguised as games. Sample puzzle: the 15 or so students, seated in a circle, are given a map and told to color each country, using as few colors as possible and making sure that the same color is not used for adjacent countries (the purpose: to learn network theory). Says Alice Schafer, the program's director: "The goal of the students is to solve the problem, while that of the instructors is to help the students discover the mathematical structure behind the problem."
Both courses, which are financed by the federal Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, have impressed students. Wellesley's course, for example, is oversubscribed and most of its "graduates" have subsequently braved higher-level math, statistics or economics. At a third innovator, Mills College in California, a pre-calculus program that stresses the necessity of math for many careers has helped make math the most popular subject among the 850 women undergraduates.
Encouraged by such response, the National Institute of Education invited Tobias, Sells, and some 40 other specialists in math anxiety to Washington in February to discuss what can be done to cure it. One major problem, the advisers agreed, is that math is widely regarded either as a male subject or as irrelevant to ordinary life. But although nobody knows for sure why math arouses so much anxiety, the experts recommended that NIE funds be spent not just on research but on specific projects, like that at Wesleyan, to combat the problem. Many also urged that such projects be aimed at grades seven to twelve in an effort to head off anxiety before it attacks. The proposed funding: nearly $1 million, starting next September.
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