Improvement Insights Blog

Is Fear of Math Holding You Back?

Many people avoid Six Sigma because they think it involves a lot of math and statistics. You know, formulas. I don’t think you need any formulas. You don’t need to be a statistician. You just need software that went to college and knows the formulas.

In The Math Gene, Author Keith Devlin explores “why so many people find mathematics impossibly hard.” He says: mathematics is the science of patterns. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do in Six Sigma, separate the wheat from the chaff, separate the signal from the noise and detect the underlying patterns of performance?

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Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros, Six Sigma.

Is a Fear of Math Stopping Your Six Sigma Projects?

I have found that a high number of people have a fear of math. They seem to think that you are either born with math skills or you aren’t.

In the Jan/Feb 2016 Scientific American Mind, author Carol Dweck reviews the most recent research into The Remarkable Reach of Growth Mind-Sets.

One study by Kathy Liu Sun found that middle school math teachers that embraced growth mind-set but did not back it up with growth mind-set teaching methods such as emphasizing underlying concepts, giving feedback and giving students a chance to revise and resubmit their work caused their students to develop a fixed mind-set.

Continue Reading "Is a Fear of Math Stopping Your Six Sigma Projects?"

Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros, Six Sigma.