Math anxiety has now been recorded in students as young as 5 years old (Ramirez, et al, 2013) and timed
tests are a major cause of this debilitating, often life-long condition. But there is a second equally important
reason that timed tests should not be used – they prompt many students to turn away from mathematics.
In my classes at Stanford University, I experience many math traumatized undergraduates, even though
they are among the highest achieving students in the country. When I ask them what has happened to
lead to their math aversion many of the students talk about timed tests in second or third grade as a major
turning point for them when they decided that math was not for them. Some of the students, especially
women, talk about the need to understand deeply, which is a very worthwhile goal, and being made to feel
that deep understanding was not valued or offered when timed tests became a part of math class. They may
have been doing other more valuable work in their mathematics classes, focusing on sense making and
understanding, but timed tests evoke such strong emotions that students can come to believe that being
fast with math facts is the essence of mathematics. This is extremely unfortunate. We see the outcome of
the misguided school emphasis on memorization and testing in the numbers dropping out of mathematics
and the math crisis we currently face (see youcubed.stanford.edu). When my own daughter started times table memorization and testing at age 5 in England she started to come home and cry about maths. This is
not the emotion we want students to associate with mathematics and as long as we keep putting students
under pressure to recall facts at speed we will not erase the widespread anxiety and dislike of mathematics
that pervades the US and UK (Silva & White, 2013; National Numeracy, 2014).