Female teachers may pass on math anxiety to girls, study finds
March 18, 2010 by colleen
Filed under Brain Training to Improve Learning
After a year in the classroom with female teachers who say they are anxious about math, girls are more likely to share that attitude — and score lower on tests, researchers say.
Girls have long embraced the stereotype that they're not supposed to be good at math. It seems they may be getting the idea from a surprising source — their female elementary school teachers.
First- and second-graders whose teachers were anxious about mathematics were more likely to believe that boys are hard-wired for math and that girls are better at reading, a new study has found. What's more, the girls who bought into that notion scored significantly lower on math tests than their peers who didn't.
The gap in test scores was not apparent in the fall when the kids were first tested, but emerged after spending a school year in the classrooms of teachers with math anxiety. That detail convinced researchers that the teachers — all of them women — were the culprits.
"Teachers who are anxious about their own math abilities are translating some of that to their kids," said University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, who led the study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study is the first both to examine the math attitudes of teachers and to show that those feelings can spread to students and undermine their performance, said coauthor Susan C. Levine, also a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
Experts said the findings could have implications for policymakers seeking to draw more women into careers in science, engineering and technology. Instead of focusing their efforts solely on female students, they could devise interventions for teachers as well.
"We always need more excellent scientists and mathematicians," said University of Wisconsin psychology professor Janet Shibley Hyde, who examines gender differences in math performance and wasn't involved in the study. "They are the force that drives the nation's economy. You don't want to dismiss 50% of the potential scientists because they're girls rather than boys. That's just crazy."
Beilock and her colleagues recruited seven female teachers from a Midwestern school district and assessed their level of math anxiety — a condition in which the prospect of doing math evokes unpleasant physiological and emotional responses. Such anxiety is more common among women, but isn't related to math abilities.
The researchers also gave math tests to 117 of the teachers' students and assessed their beliefs about math and gender at the beginning and the end of the school year.
source: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/26/science/la-sci-math26-2010jan26
