Personality types & Math Education
Along with Googling MBTI personality types under stress (found here), I found a blog post about MBTI types and math education that caught my attention (since I am currently learning about math education).
Math is usally taught in a certain way that doesn’t come naturally to many personality types:
- “You stayed in your own seat, stuck to your own paper, came up with your own answers. And working together on a problem wasn’t collaboration, it was cheating.” This is more geared towards Introverts.
- “Math was taught as a million different discrete problems that built up, bit by bit, to larger concepts—which is a very S (Sencing) approach. Everything had an order and a sequence that eventually led to a comprehensive explanation of the subject. But N (iNtuition) people like to see the big picture first, so that they understand why they are doing all the individual problems….[but] ‘show all steps of your work’ approach… [is] used in… math classes.”
- “What does F (Feeling) have to do with whether 2 plus 2 adds up to 4, or that the area of the circle is Pi times the radius squared? …math [is presented] as a completely abstract, logical, impersonal subject.”
- And finally, “math as a very black/white, right/wrong, only one right answer kind of way… P (Perceiving) people like open-ended answers, multiple possibilities, and options.”
And the author also points out, this isn’t necessarily a “bad” or “wrong” way of teaching, but people have difference preferences. So my stance is that some people have more natural tendencies to like or dislike the way math is taught (leading into not liking math as a subject at all).
However, as the author of the post ALSO points out, math CAN be taught differently! Read more here.
