Friday, 27 February 2026 T4EU SCIENCE CAFÉE: Anxious about mathematics? Is that even real?
HOST: University of Primorska, Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies (UP FAMNIT)
TOPIC: Anxious about mathematics? Is that even real?
DATE: Thursday, March 5, 2026, 17:00 – 18:30 CET
LOCATION: UP FAMNIT Lobby
The event will be broadcast live via T4EU’s YouTube.
DESCRIPTION:
Mathematical achievement and students’ career choices depend not only on the quality of teaching and their cognitive abilities, but also on their attitudes and emotional experiences. One of the most important of these is math anxiety, that is a feeling of tension, worry, or even fear that arises when dealing with numbers or mathematical tasks.
In this talk, we will explore what math anxiety is, how common it is, and how it manifests in everyday situations from the classroom to exams and real-life decision making. Understanding that this form of anxiety exists, and recognizing its impact, is the first step toward helping students cope with it and build more positive, confident relationships with mathematics.
Whether you are a teacher, a student, or simply someone who has ever thought “I’m just not a math person,” this talk aims to shed light on how emotions shape our engagement with mathematics - and what we can do about it.
Our guest at the Science Café will be Assoc. Prof. Krzysztof Cipora from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The discussion will also feature students of Psychology and Biopsychology from UP FAMNIT.
About Assoc. Prof. Krzysztof Cipora
Krzysztof Cipora is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and co-leads the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Lab (MCLL). After completing his PhD at Jagiellonian University, he continued his research career as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen in Germany and as a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Mathematical Cognition at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.
His research focuses on:
- basic numerical processing and its relationship to mathematical skills,
- math anxiety and its impact on performance across different groups,
- the influence of language and culture on cognition, as well as issues of open science and research reproducibility.
He is currently leading and collaborating on international projects investigating spatial-numerical cognition in mathematicians and strategies to reduce math anxiety among future teachers.
Dr. Cipora will take part in the Visiting Professorship programme within the framework of Transform4Europe (T4EU), an international initiative that brings leading scholars to partner universities to enrich teaching, research, and academic collaboration.
The programme goes beyond short-term mobility, supporting knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary cooperation, and joint engagement with key societal, digital, and environmental challenges across Europe.
