You don’t have to be born with math skills; solving problems is a matter of studying and motivation. That may not seem like such a surprise, but it’s become easy to say ‘I just can’t do math.’ While some element of math achievement may be linked to natural inborn intelligence, when it comes to developing skills during high school, motivation and math study habits are much more important than IQ, according to a new study. “It’s not how smart we are; it’s how motivated we are and how effectively we study that determines growth in math achievement over time,” says Kou Murayama, a post-doctoral psychology researcher at University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the study published in the journal Child Development. Murayama and his colleagues studied math achievement among roughly 3,500 public school students living in the German state of Bavariain. The German students were tracked from the fifth grade through the tenth grade and given an annual (grade-appropriate) standardized math exam every year. The kids were also given an IQ test, and asked about their attitudes toward math. In particular, the psychologists were interested in how much the adolescents believed that math achievement was something within their control, and whether the kids were interested in math for its own sake. They also asked the students about study strategies, such as whether they would try to link concepts together when learning new material, or simply try to memorize the steps to typical problems. To their surprise, the researches found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how much new material the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account. “Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students … Continue reading Motivation, Not IQ, Matters Most for Learning New Math Skills