Dr Meena Mehta Kotecha, PhD (Cantab), is emerging as a leading scholar in the field of understanding and reducing mathematics anxiety, which is an important issue for educational and science policy and practice. Her research has connections with topics that are of central interest to psychological and behavioural science, e.g., academic perfectionism, motivation, communication, and the imposter syndrome in universities. Meena served the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS) at the London School of Economics (LSE) as Course Tutor in Quantitative Methods and Statistics during the academic year 2022-23. She led PB130 and PB230 courses during this period, and supervised PBS students’ research projects.
Currently, Meena is working with Cambridge University Press on writing a monograph on mathematics anxiety. She was invited by Sage Publishers for filming her talk, which took place in September 2023 at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) annual international conference. This talk is entitled “Mathematics Anxiety and Learning Experience of Statistics and Research Methods” and will be published in 2024.
Meena achieved her PhD from the University of Cambridge in January 2022. This multi-mixed methods research was conducted to help students tackle mathematics anxiety, which is prevalent among university students reading social sciences (generally known as non-specialists). Statistics and research methods courses are core components of social science degree programmes and entail knowledge of mathematics. Mathematics anxiety adversely impacts non-specialists’ participation and performance in these courses hence their future career progression. During her PhD study, Meena obtained new insights into mathematics anxiety and developed a pedagogical intervention to help mathematics anxiety sufferers. Her intervention is underpinned by an overarching framework that combines sociological and psychological perspectives. She empirically tested her intervention’s impact on non-specialists studying statistics and research methods courses.
In June 2019, Meena was a keynote speaker at a conference “Teaching Statistics to Non-Specialists”, jointly organised by the Universities of Nottingham, and Birmingham. Her keynote talk was entitled "Teaching Statistics to Non-Specialists-What can we learn from the social scientists?” In July 2017, she was invited to speak about teaching excellence at the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) conference. Meena has been named as an LSE Innovator by The Learning Technology and Innovation department at LSE and is an LSE Teaching Prize Winner for both statistics and operational research methods (2008, 2013 and 2016). She was included in Jisc’s list of the 50 most influential university education professionals. She has been presenting invited sessions at the RSS annual international conferences since 2016. Two of her four research supervisees from LSE PB presented their research posters at the RSS Annual International Conference held in September 2023 and attended by 640 delegates. In 2011, she initiated student-led education at LSE.
Her multidisciplinary educational background has had a substantial impact on her research interests and teaching practice. She obtained BA Honours in Philosophy and Psychology followed by master’s in Sociology from the University of Mumbai. Her goal was to obtain a PhD in Sociology in order to fulfil her aspiration to serve academia as a social scientist. However, she decided to read mathematics with the Open University and was awarded First Class honours in Mathematical Sciences. This sparked off her teaching career in HE with a lecturing post in mathematics and statistics in the Mathematics Department at the University of Hertfordshire (UH), and was followed by her post as a lecturer, examiner, and course leader in Quantitative Methods at the University of Hertfordshire business school (UHBS). She has been teaching mathematics, statistics, research methods, and operational research methods at LSE since 2006.
Meena is an invited member of The RSS Education committee and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) London branch committee since October 2013. Since 2015, Meena has co-organised three mathematics education international conferences in collaboration with the IMA and the University of Glasgow in 2015; the University of Warwick in 2016; and the Open University in 2017. Furthermore, she co-chaired the scientific committees of the first two of these conferences. Her full biography can be accessed here https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9211-5988.
Awards
- A certificate of service, as an IMA Academic Representative at the LSE, was presented by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in December 2020.
- Named as an LSE Innovator by The Learning Technology and Innovation department at LSE in 2016.
- Teaching Prize awarded by the Department of management (DoM), LSE in May 2016.
- Included in Jisc’s list of the 50 most influential university education professionals in the UK.
- Teaching Prize awarded by DoM, LSE in 2013.
- Interviewed by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in November 2010.
- Glory of India Award & Certificate of Excellence presented by India International Society(IIF) in September 2010.
- Teaching Prize awarded by the Department of statistics, LSE in July 2008.
- Fellow’s status (FHEA) awarded by the Advance HE in March 2007.
- Chartered Mathematician’s designation awarded in January 2003 by the IMA.
- Membership awarded in September 2001 by the Institute of Learning and Teaching in the Higher Education (ILTHE)