Having recently completed a small exploratory study (124 respondents) of the way that maths-anxious undergraduates in the UK make sense of their maths anxiety (MA), I was prompted to consider: had I heard their reflections sooner, would I have been better positioned to help my anxious primary school pupils?
My study trialled a novel iterative survey version of a research method called the Imitation Game (Collins et al., 2006) which is itself based on the Turing Test (Turing, 1950), in which a computer is considered artificial intelligence if its responses are indistinguishable from those of a human. The Imitation Game is designed to capture the ‘groupishness’ (Evans et al., 2019) of groups and I employed a survey version of it to capture the shared elements of MA that are distinctive and characteristic; I wanted to know what experiences, thoughts and feelings best embody MA. Ethical approval was granted by the university and all research council and university ethics guidance was adhered to.
