Thursday, April 2, 2009

Most Students Fear Math

Study: Most colleges students fear math,

so the headline reads.

Ok, let's forget the grammatical error (from a publication that claims, as a subtitle, "100 years of journalistic excellence").

The headline had me laughing. My inner sarcastic voice was saying, "Duh!"

I wonder how much the study cost? I wonder if a straw poll of the university math professors could have given a close result? If I were a person that bets, I'd put money on the professors having the same results with a poll put in their boxes and no funds lost.

According to this research, done at the University of Granada in Spain, 6 out of 10 students have math anxiety and the anxiety is reported more in the Health Sciences than in Technical Education. (I think the ratio is probably higher in the U.S. - if I were a betting person, I'd put money on it.) And I'm certain that I'd rather have an engineer, than the doctor, figure out the mathematically correct dose of medication for my child.

If anyone wants to know this kind of information, they should just ask a math teacher.

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