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"As you may remember from your own (in)glorious youth, most university students are required to take a statistics course even if they hate math and aren’t in a particularly numbers-heavy major.
Ellen Peters, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, heard this was driving a lot undergrads on her campus crazy. “A lot of the students are really threatened by it. They’re kind of afraid of it, they dread taking it,” she says. “If they do dread it, they can end up in a cycle of failure.”
Curious to see if she could make a positive change among math-phobic Buckeyes, Peters created an intervention that tested whether or not value affirmation could improve student’s comfort and ability with numbers, otherwise known as numerical literacy or numeracy.
The results, which were published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, indicate that confidence and core values have a lot to do with learning the numbers."
