Abstract:

The learning of quantitative materials is an integral part of a complete business education, especially considering the growing importance of analytics and statistics (Carroll, 2023). However, many business students are hampered by quant anxiety, or the fear and worry related to quantitative stimuli and situations. They have difficulties handling transformations between verbal reasoning and mathematical symbols. Such difficulties may lead to frustrating learning experience, poor performance, and eventually, impacting career choices (Daker et al., 2021; Dugan & Allen, 2016). Although much work has been done about math anxiety among school children, less is known about the impact of quant anxiety among adult learners (Barroso et al., 2021). We conduct a multi-method study to understand quant anxiety among students enrolled in a Master-level Corporate Finance subject in a university in Hong Kong. Some of these students were professionals who had been a few years removed from quantitative learning and were uncomfortable with calculations; others were Accounting and Finance professionals and were very confident about quantitative work. We sought to gain initial understanding of how instructors could alleviate quant anxiety among the former group while keeping the subject challenging for the latter through in-depth interviews with a group of students who had completed the subject previously. We found that the sources of anxiety stemmed from both the content (e.g., lack of prior knowledge) and the context (e.g., lack of peer support) of learning. We also identified five factors that might help students manage quant anxiety, namely, application, iterative feedback, group dynamics, learning mindset, and expectation transparency (collectively known as AIGLE). We tested the AIGLE model among a cohort of 80 students to assess its effectiveness. We explored practical implications for instructors seeking to manage quant anxiety among adult learners without watering down the learning materials.

Keywords:

Adult Education, Math Anxiety, Collaborative Learning, Math Education Experiences, HE, quant anxiety.