Getting emotional with mathematics

SEL. Social-Emotional Learning. Doesn’t it sound wonderful? I’d say it’s “SELegant”. Yes it is a wonderful, elegant educational innovation. Young pupils who have enrolled in social-emotional learning have been shown to do better in school. Children are basically taught to manage their  emotions, how not to be too emotional in dealing with other, how to be rightly empathetic and things like that. This sort of training helps children cope with different challenges in school and well in general, life. Humans are not only biological but of course, socio-emotional, socio-cultural beings. My readings on this subject tells me that in the US, children who had social-emotional learning classes have “stable jobs” in their mid-20s. Remember IQ is nothing without EQ.

Take for example what a very recent study has found out among young Chinese students. These Chinese students turn out to have done better in mathematics specifically pointing out that “emotion management had a more positive influence on subsequent emotion management, cognitive reappraisal, and homework completion…”(Xu, J et al, 2019).

Math is an essential and critical discipline needed for a country to progress. So our young children have to have a good grounding in math. Interesting, what seems to be an emotionless area of knowledge can be impacted by emotion regulation on the part of the learner.

In a study that involved Chinese Students in 8^th grade, “…results revealed that emotion management and math achievement were reciprocally related” (…”(Xu, J et al, 2019). The researchers studied over one thousand Chinese students and “student ratings [were] used to assess emotion regulation and homework completion.”

What anyone can glean from the said research study could be that if young students do not have much anxiety facing mathematics and studying it, then they can certainly achieve better.

Young children in school should be taught how to handle nervousness in terms of dealing with numbers. They should be taught to focus on how to solve math problems and realizing each time that math is needed to succeed in life and that they are learning math for the good of the country.

See? Emotional management and learning go hand in hand.

Reference:

JianzhongXu^aJianxiaDu^bFangtongLiu^bBosuHuang^b, 2019. Emotion Regulation, Homework Completion, and Math Achievement: Testing Models of Reciprocal Effects. Contemporary Educational Psychology Available online 24 October 2019, 101810. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.101810

Module 1.3 SOCIO-EMOTIONAL PROCESSES. https://myportal.upou.edu.ph/mod/resource/view.php?id=143094