Math and MBTI Psychological Type

Happy Math Storytelling Day!  This is an event in honor of my dear friend, Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, whose birthday is it today.  The idea is that we share our stories about math with each other.

So my story involves math education and psychological type as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  This past winter, I taught an online class through P2PU on the Psychology of Math Learning.  The idea of the class was to look at various psychological theories, including MBTI personality type theory, to see if it would give us insight on why math can be such a struggle to so many learners.  (For more details on the class, you can read my original blog post about it).

The structure of the class was that each week, we would take an online test about one of these theories, then post our "score," such as our MBTI type, which in my case is ENFP (Extravert, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving).  Then we would reflect on our experience learning math, and see if we noticed any ways that our test results might have helped or hindered our math education.

The class didn't work out quite like I planned, because even though this approach was explained in all the class descriptions, and had a couple dozen people sign up, the only students who ever posted their scores or their reflections on the theory and their math experience were the Extraverts!  So, we ended up with a skewed sample of respondents.  But we Extraverts had a great time talking about things between ourselves.

However, it was an eye-opening revelation for me.  Math had always been my worst subject at school; worst NOT in the sense of grades, since I was the kind of student who would do whatever I needed to do to get an A, but in the sense that I knew I didn't really understand the answers I was regurgitating back on my graded work.  And that wasn't usually the case for me--generally, I understood the concepts behind all my other subjects.  So I never liked math, thought I wasn't good at math, and never took any academic math classes past my required Algebra II/Trig in my junior year of high school.

But by looking at MBTI, I could see at least part of the reason why.  Because the way I was taught math was EXACTLY opposite to my personality style.

• Math was taught as a completely I (Introvert) subject.  You stayed in your own seat, stuck to your own paper, came up with your own answers.  Any working together on a problem wasn't collaboration, it was cheating.  Even in Science, we at least had lab partners when we worked on experiments, and did lots of group projects in the Arts and Humanities (my favorite subjects).  But in math, I don't ever remember working with another student.
• Math was taught as a million different discrete problems that built up, bit by bit, to larger concepts--which is a very S (Sensing) 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.  N people also usually don't fare very well in the high-sequenced, "show all steps of your work" approach that was used in my academic math classes.
• Why subject could possible be more T (Thinking) than math?  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?  I was presented math as a completely abstract, logical, impersonal subject, which isn't something that we emotional, subjective, relationship-oriented F people particularly like.
• Finally, I was taught math as a very black/white, right/wrong, only one right answer kind of way, which is what MBTI calls J (Judging).  P (Perceiving) people like open-ended answers, multiple possibilities, and options.  But I was never given any of those shades of gray in my math classes.

Let me make two things clear.  First, I'm not saying that any of those approaches are "bad" or "wrong."  The whole basis of MBTI is these different preferences, which we are born with, are not better or worse than each other.  They are just different.  I doubt I had bad math classes, because I went to good schools and I'm sure I had good math teachers.  That was just how math was taught in those days.  And I'm sure that approach works brilliantly for some people--just not for me and my personality style.

Secondly, I now know that math doesn't have to be that way.  Math education has come a long way since then, and there are many more ways that math is presented these days in schools.  I am also so thankful that I met Maria, and through her, all the people on the Natural Math loop who have shown me math as a rainbow, not just a black and white subject.  For example, Math Mama Sue Van Hatten just recently had a blog post about how her students work together in groups.  The wonderful math-rich puzzles presented by Math Pickle encourage students to find many answers to the same problem.  Maria is constantly presenting math as fun, and as beautiful, and as creative, and as a vehicle for individual expression.  And I could go on and on about the wonderful new math educators who are diversifying the experience of this important field.

So my story has a happy ending.  Maria and others have helped me to "grow new math eyes" so I can appreciate math in a way that works for my personality.  But I think my story also has a moral, which is that math instruction (and all instruction, really) needs to meet the individual's personality and style, at least to some extent.  If you are a teacher or a parent or a homeschooler (some of my readers are all three), and your math teaching isn't working, consider the personality of the student who is having problems.  It is easy for us to get so caught up in our own MBTI preferences that we don't even notice that we are only giving open-ended exploratory problems to students who do better with more structure, or refuse to even consider a response from our creative thinkers that is different than the one in the answer key, which we find so reassuring.

Curriculum Resource: MBTI Website for Teens/Tweens

One of my more popular posts of 2010 was the one I wrote about how I was teaching a class of middle schoolers and teens about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the leading personality assessment instrument being used today.  I used four experiential exercises to help them understand the four preference continuums on which the MBTI score is based, then had them place themselves where they thought they belonged on each of the scales.  We then tested their self-assessments by taking questionnaires that gave them their MBTI scores.  The students seemed to really enjoy the exercises, and the discussions they generated gave them some great insight not only into themselves, but into their families and friends.

I still advocate that kind of approach for teens and tweens--that is, having them get an experience of the dichotomies of the MBTI scores before getting into their scores and what those are supposed to mean.  That is why I like to teach MBTI in a group, because we are more like to have great examples of both ends of each continuum, which helps personalize it and have it make more sense to the kids (and, really, to most adults as well).

However, if you are working on MBTI with your children and/or students, I recently found a website that I think is helpful.  It is called Typecan, and it was developed by high school and college students (working with adult "mentors") under the auspices of the Center for the Application of Psychological Type, one of the premier organizations offering training and resources on Myers-Briggs.  It is geared to presenting MBTI information in a "teen-friendly" way and helping students to apply it to the situations that they are facing--school stress, teenage relationships, and trying to decide about colleges and careers.

It is really a little more geared to the high school or even college student than middle schoolers, but it could be used with the tween crowd as well.  It's not the best about explaining the 16 MBTI types, so I would cover that first by a class, assessment test, or other basic MBTI website.  But it is the best site I've found so far in showing how understanding MBTI can help students navigate the educational, relationship, and career challenges that occur at this age.

If anyone else has found good resources for working with Myers-Briggs with middle or high schoolers, please add them to the comments below.

Free Online Class for Parents and Teachers on the Psychology of Math Learning

Can psychological theories, such as personality type and learning style, help explain why some students take naturally to math while others struggle?  This is a subject of a FREE online class that I will be leading for the next six weeks through the School of Math Future in Peer-to-Peer University (called P2PU).

Actually, while it is called a class, it is more like a technology-facilitated discussion group.  The philosophy behind P2PU is that people with common interests all have something to share with each other, even if some have more experience or schooling than others.  So I am setting up the structure of the classes and giving us all some exercises and/or reading so we have some common ground to talk about, but all the participants will be equally involved in coming up with answers, or at least suggestions, to the discussion topics.

The structure of the class is that each week we will focus on one type of psychological theory and see if it can help to explain why some of us find math to breeze while others just don't seem to "get it."  The proposed theories we will be exploring are:

• Myers-Briggs Personality Style
• Left-brained/Right-brained Learners
• Learning Modalities
• Gender Differences

Participants will take online assessment tests and post their results to the group, along with a written reflections whether they think that assessment has any baring on their success or failure in math.  Thus, most of the class will take place asynchronously through sharing written statements on the class forum.  However, there will be one "real-time" web discussion each week, which will take place on Tuesday evenings at 9:00 PM Eastern time.  Class members who are available at that time will pose questions and exchange thoughts on that week's assignments; the other members can review the discussion at their convenience, since the "live" sessions will be taped.  I expect that participating in the class will require approximately 2-3 hours per week (doing the assessments, writing posts, engaging in the "live" discussion, etc.).

Here is the official description of the class:

Summary

  More than almost any other discipline, mathematics can cause real angst for those students who just "don't get it" (have you ever heard of "history anxiety" or "art anxiety"?). But why do some students find math to be a fun, natural, and creative discipline, while others struggle and just can't seem to figure it out, no matter how hard they work on it? To answer this question, educators tend to focus on the "nurture" factors, such as the parents' abilities and feelings about math, whether the student lives in a math-rich environment, the quality of the math teachers, or the type of curriculum followed. But in this class, we'll be exploring the "nature" side of the question. We will look at psychological theories, such as personality style, learning style, and gender differences, to see if they can illuminate why some of us think math is joy, while for others it seems more like a nightmare.

Learning objectives

The objectives of this course are:

• to learn some basics about psychological theories such as personality styles, learning modalities, and gender differences;
• to assess our own styles within these theories and consider whether they had an influence on our experience with math;
• to share our assessment with each other to see if we can find any general trends that relate specific psychological traits to math success or failure.

If you are interested in joining us, please follow the signup instructions on the P2PU website at: http://p2pu.org/math-future/psychology-math-learning .  But the class starts next week (this session runs from January 26 - March 9, 2011), so be sure to respond soon if you are interested.

The School of Math Future also has some other free classes running on P2PU.  They include

Math-rich baby and toddler environment

Introduction to Math Art

Create+Share Math Interactives

Mathematics for Game Designers

Short Calculus

Mathematics Curriculum Development

CPD through Twitter for Mathematics educators

All are free and still have space available as of this evening, although space is limited.

Curriculum Resource: Keirsey MBTI Analysis

Today we had the last of our Psychology class, which is kind of sad, because I have really been enjoying it.  Among other things, we had a discussion about how the four different trait spectrums in the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory combine to create 16 different specific personality types.  Each student (and teacher) had taken the test online, so we got to see who was most similar, who what most different, and how the change in just one trait characteristic (like from ENFP to INFP) made a huge different in the personality style.

We've only been able to dip into this subject; people have spent years and acquired all sorts of advanced degrees trying to analyze this data.  However, for those who are interested in learning more on just a working-knowledge level, I recommend the work of David Keirsey.  He has written two books, Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II, that I think are the best non-specialists books on this subject. Keirsey not only has descriptions of each personality type, but groups them into four categories of personality style (which he calls Personality Temperaments):  Guardians, Idealists, Artisans, and Rationals. I don't necessarily agree with all of his analyses and groupings...but, then, he has a PhD in Psychology and I don't, so don't listen to me.

You can take a free test for your Keirsey-style MBTI personality type and learn more about your personality type at: http://www.keirsey.com/default.aspx# .

While I've been using this tool with my son for years, I think it is definitely a great thing to introduce to middle schoolers.  This is the time in their lives when they are really trying to figure out who they are compared to their peers and family, and a familiarity with personality type can really help them understand both themselves and others.

Lesson Plan: MBTI for Tweens/Teens

In our psychology class today, we covered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is probably the most widely-used psychologically-validated personality test in this country, and probably the world.  While I have taught this to hundreds of adults, it was particularly satisfying to cover this material with this age group (middle school to young teens).  As opposed to adults, who usually have at least some inkling about some of the MBTI traits, this age group has usually never been exposed to these terms before.  But as it is presented, you can really see them taking it in and applying it to themselves and other people among their families and friends.  And I personally think this is a fabulous thing to expose them to early, because I think understanding Myers-Briggs differences between people can really reduce judgement and conflict between people, whether applied to your family, your friends, your community, or your world.

There are four trait continuums in the Myers-Briggs test:
Extrovert (outward focused, get energy from social interaction) vs. Introvert (inwardly focused, gets energy from being alone)
Sensory (gets information from senses, usually linear and sequential thinker, focused on the tangible, component thinker/sees trees rather than forest) vs. Intuitive (gets information from mental connections between items, usually broad/web-like thinker, focused on patterns and relationships, big picture thinker/sees forest rather than trees)
Thinking (makes decision based on logical, rational, data-driven process) vs. Feeling (makes decisions based on feelings, emotions, or non-logical process)
Judging (prefers life that is known, routine, fixed, organized, closed-ended or settled) vs. Perceiving (prefers life that is casual, flexible, changing, unpredictable, open-ended or unsettled)

I tried to come up with an experiential exercise to help introduce each trait.  For Extrovert vs. Introvert, I had one side throw a ball into a bag held by a partner on the other side after saying a word they related to the word “outgoing.”  The other side had to get the ball out of the bag, say a word they related to the word “introspective,” then throw it back to the other side.  The point of this exchange, besides having them think about what it is to be outgoing (extroverted) or introspective (introverted), is that extroverts are always willing to throw the conversational ball to you, but introverts usually have to go within (in this case, within the bag) before coming up with a conversational ball to return to the other side.

For Sensory vs. Intuitive, I gave them slices of apples, told them to look at them, feel them, smell them, then close their eyes and eat them, then write down what they noticed/thought about.  Some people stuck strictly to describing the apple (Sensory information).  Others began to drift off to other topics:  from apples to oatmeal (from eating apple cinnamon oatmeal) to thinking about being hungry (or not) to eating something else to nutritional science to something as far flung as Reese Witherspoon (OK, so that was me, but it’s not as crazy as you might think...apples made me think of apple picking, which made me think of the rumor that Taylor Swift went on an apple-picking date with Jake Gyllenhaal, which made me think about him breaking up with...Reese Witherspoon!)  The answers to this question helped them see who stuck to more tangible or sensory information, and who wandered over to the realm of the Intuitives.

For Thinking vs. Feeling, I gave them this dilemma.  Our class of eight students have been offered an all-expense-paid trip to a fabulous place that everyone would enjoy (such as Disneyworld).  However, the offer is only good for a maximum of six students.  Should we turn it down if everyone can’t go?  Or if we accept, how do we decide who should go and who should be left behind?  Again, there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this.  However, during the discussion of their reasoning in answering this question, it was pretty easy to see who was thinking logically(give preference to those who haven’t been before, or just choose randomly, etc. ) and who was thinking emotionally (we should stay instead of leaving people out, or I would rather not go then leave a friend behind).

For our final trait (Judging vs. Perceiving), I gave them an easy example:  Describe the scene at your house as you prepare to come to the coop where the class is being given today.  A few had stories of a quiet, organized, prepared morning (everyone Judging), but most of the students were telling tales out of school, confessing that their mothers were yelling at them to hurry up because they were running late (Judging parent, Perceiving children) or children who were fussing at their parents to hurry up or they would be late as the mother was still running off sheets for today’s class (Judging children, Perceiving parent). 

This was a fun, but more accessible way, to present the MBTI to the students.  After each trait discussion, we also created a continuum in the classroom and had the students place themselves where they thought they were on each trait (extreme E, slight E, borderline E/I, slight I, exteme I, etc.).  Then they are supposed to go home and take an online MBTI test and see if their test results fit where they rate themselves.

Curriculum Resource: Introducing Personality Testing to Middle Schoolers

A friend and I are co-teaching a class at our coop on Psychology for middle schoolers/early high schoolers.  Today I was introducing the topic of Personality Testing; to be specific, I was starting to discuss the use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is generally regarded as the most widely-used personality assessment test.  The official figures say that two million people take the test each year, and that number is probably increased multiple times by those who take non-official assessments out of books or websites.

In my professional life, I have done a lot of work with adults in using MBTI.  However, I must confess I have never used it with such a young age group.  However, I decided to start with the same quote I hav always used to introduce personality assessment to adults.  It is an edited quoted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's very thought-provoking work, Notes from the Underground:

Now I ask you: what can be expected of man...? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity,... simply in order to prove to himself...that men still are men and not the keys of a piano.... And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. ... If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

This quote, like most of Notes from the Underground, is quite dense, so it make take several times of reading it through to really get what he is saying.

The tweens/teens read it through with a good bit of giggling, as they were amused by the idea of eating nothing but cakes (quite a different nutritional message then they usually hear...but, of course, Dostoevsky was not refering to nutrition) and somewhat scintillated  by the phrase "busy himself with the continuation of the species."   Several claimed that they had no idea what the quote meant, but some others rephrased it as stating that people will do anything to avoid being manipulated (which is a pretty good distillation of the passage).  This generated a good discussion about how people hate to be controlled or put into boxes, and the sometimes extreme measures we will go to in order to avoid that happening (this could be one interpretation of why Adam and Eve chose to eat the apple that expelled them from paradise).

Several students volunteered examples of things they or someone they had done simply to defy expectations.  I offered a story from my childhood memories.  One time when my family and I were going to that great Washington DC area ice cream establishment, Giffords Ice Cream, my brothers were teasing me about how I was going to get Swiss Chocolate ice cream because that was what I ALWAYS got.  And that might have been bad enough, but one brother said, "Well, she has to get chocolate, because girls ALWAYS choose chocolate."  Well, that was it!  No way I could get chocolate now--I had to take a feminist stand!  So I got coconut ice cream instead.  Now, Gifford's coconut ice cream is really, really good--but honestly, I really wanted the Swiss Chocolate instead.

So this story illustrates several valuable points about personality work:
1.  We have recurring personality patterns
2.  Other people pick up those personality patterns
3.  People make predictions based on those personality patterns
4.  Even though we have a tendency towards a recurring pattern, we can always make a different choice.
5.  If we feel we are being too boxed in by other people (or even by ourselves) by our past patterns, we may strike out and do something completely different, even if we end up suffering from that decision.  But we would rather give up our good than, as Dostoevsky says, think of ourselves as a piano key being played by some outside power.

So even thought the crowd was young, this quote sparked a good discussion.  It was particularly important for these young people, I thought, because last week most of the said they wanted to take the class so that they could control, manipulate, or predict other people in their lives.  I suggested that a more powerful way to look at this was as a means to understand ourselves and others, rather than to control or predict them.  I'm not sure we've convinced them of the value of understanding yet.  But I think we've begun to expose them to the inherent difficulties in trying to control others.