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closeConfusing cause and effect
Posted by Lavir_the_Whiolet on 07 Nov 2012 at 19:18 GMT
IMHO, the cause and the effect are confused. It is not "people do math bad because they are afraid of it" but it is "people are afraid of math because they know they do it bad". For example, let's imagine an ordinary John who is not familiar with maths (due to lack of talent or just mooching). And we make him to sit and tell him: "we will soon give you a math problem and you will need to solve it". And now imagine that we told the same to a math professor. It is obvious that John will be far more worried.
RE: Confusing cause and effect
imlyons replied to Lavir_the_Whiolet on 08 Nov 2012 at 16:22 GMT
The majority of studies on math anxiety (including this one) are correlational. Thus, a strong causal inference in either direction is ill-advised (see, for instance, the warning about causal inference in Figure 1 of the current paper).