May 2025
The Hechinger Report—OPINION: A big reason why students who are anxious about math underperform — they just don’t do enough of it
On May 2025, Dr. Ian Lyons and Dr. Rich Daker published an outreach article through The Hechinger Report, a popular publication aimed at educators.
Below is the article introduction:
Math anxiety isn’t just about feeling nervous before a math test. It’s been well-known for decades that students who are anxious about math tend to do worse on math tests and in math classes.
But recently, some of us who research math anxiety have started to realize that we may have overlooked a simple yet important reason why students who are anxious about math underperform: They don’t like doing math, and as a result, they don’t do enough of it.
We wanted to get a better idea of just what kind of impact math anxiety could have on academic choices and academic success throughout college. In one of our studies, we measured math anxiety levels right when students started their postsecondary education. We then followed them throughout their college career, tracking what classes they took and how well they did in them.
September 2019
Semper Curious Colloquium—Where numbers come from and what they mean
In September 2019, Dr. Lyons was involved in an interview/colloquium for a group called Semper Curious, whose aim is to make research topics accessible to a broader audience. You can learn more about Semper Curious and their mission here: https://www.sempercurious.com/.
Below is the description for the interview segment:
The ability to guide behavior based on relative differences in perceived magnitudes is one of the most ancient cognitive capacities we know of. The ability to represent quantities in written, abstract and exact form is—as far as we know—exclusive to humans and only a few millennia in the making. Are these two abilities linked, and as for the latter, what took us so long? What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie numerical processing in humans and other species?
Ian Lyons is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University. He received a bachelor of science from Brown University in 2004 in Cognitive Science. In 2012, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago in Cognitive Psychology.”
