Feeling 'Good' in the Math Classroom: Theoretical Perspectives on Mathematical Well-being
Presentation Type
Poster Presentation
Category
STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics)
Abstract/Artist Statement
Twenty years ago, a study found that nearly 20% of adolescents in the U.S. experience an episode of clinical depression by the end of high school (Lewinsohn et al., 1993). On the global scale, this number ranges from 8 to 20% (Naicker et al., 2013) and once in college, it does not get better. This year alone, 47.3% of students at the University of Montana reported moderate to serious psychological stress [Kessler 6 Scale] and 38.2% reported feelings of hopeless most or all of the time. We are facing a very significant problem in the area of young adult well-being today. So what can we do about it?
Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life worth living. It is an up-and-rising area of psychology that uses empirical methods to examine constructs like human flourishing, creativity, well-being, engagement, and happiness. A positive education refers to educational systems garnered to teach both the skills of well-being and traditional achievement. Many experiments (prominently in Australia) have measured success rates of integrating positivity into school settings. But recent studies now point to a possible hidden variable at play: one’s state of well-being could also be context dependent, as well as value dependent. Meaning a student’s subjective sense of well-being in the classroom may differ between individual subject disciplines as well as our own cultures and geography. Mathematics is a subject feared by many and enjoyed by fewer. It is viewed as a gatekeeping subject, and often reports high levels of low-engagement, anxiety, and negative emotions across all grade levels. While frameworks for understanding students’ context-dependent mathematical well-being have been proposed in the past, this area in mathematics education is still at its complete infancy. In addition to this, connections between ‘well-being’ from the positive psychologists, student well-being from the educational researchers, and subject-dependent well-being is not yet well understood. Using a known framework for teaching well-being and the latest framework for understanding (domain-specific) mathematical well-being, I propose embedding well-being practices to a subset of the University of Montana’s intro-level mathematics courses. As a first part to this project, a thorough literature review of well-being programs was conducted, and a model for positive, collegiate mathematics education was synthesized. In this process, the questions “Should a positive mathematics education exist?” and “Can a positive mathematics education exist?” were also approached using various theoretical lenses from areas of creativity research, positive psychology, and education. It is our hope that a successful integration of positivity into first-year math classes will allow UM a spot as one of the nation’s first universities attempting to concretely improve student well-being from one of the most unexpected places yet: a college-level math department.
Mentor Name
Bharath Sriraman
Feeling 'Good' in the Math Classroom: Theoretical Perspectives on Mathematical Well-being
UC North Ballroom
Twenty years ago, a study found that nearly 20% of adolescents in the U.S. experience an episode of clinical depression by the end of high school (Lewinsohn et al., 1993). On the global scale, this number ranges from 8 to 20% (Naicker et al., 2013) and once in college, it does not get better. This year alone, 47.3% of students at the University of Montana reported moderate to serious psychological stress [Kessler 6 Scale] and 38.2% reported feelings of hopeless most or all of the time. We are facing a very significant problem in the area of young adult well-being today. So what can we do about it?
Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life worth living. It is an up-and-rising area of psychology that uses empirical methods to examine constructs like human flourishing, creativity, well-being, engagement, and happiness. A positive education refers to educational systems garnered to teach both the skills of well-being and traditional achievement. Many experiments (prominently in Australia) have measured success rates of integrating positivity into school settings. But recent studies now point to a possible hidden variable at play: one’s state of well-being could also be context dependent, as well as value dependent. Meaning a student’s subjective sense of well-being in the classroom may differ between individual subject disciplines as well as our own cultures and geography. Mathematics is a subject feared by many and enjoyed by fewer. It is viewed as a gatekeeping subject, and often reports high levels of low-engagement, anxiety, and negative emotions across all grade levels. While frameworks for understanding students’ context-dependent mathematical well-being have been proposed in the past, this area in mathematics education is still at its complete infancy. In addition to this, connections between ‘well-being’ from the positive psychologists, student well-being from the educational researchers, and subject-dependent well-being is not yet well understood. Using a known framework for teaching well-being and the latest framework for understanding (domain-specific) mathematical well-being, I propose embedding well-being practices to a subset of the University of Montana’s intro-level mathematics courses. As a first part to this project, a thorough literature review of well-being programs was conducted, and a model for positive, collegiate mathematics education was synthesized. In this process, the questions “Should a positive mathematics education exist?” and “Can a positive mathematics education exist?” were also approached using various theoretical lenses from areas of creativity research, positive psychology, and education. It is our hope that a successful integration of positivity into first-year math classes will allow UM a spot as one of the nation’s first universities attempting to concretely improve student well-being from one of the most unexpected places yet: a college-level math department.