People's fear and anxiety about doing math-over and above actual math ability-can be an impediment to their math achievement. We show that when the math-anxious individuals are female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that these female teachers' anxieties relate to girls' math achievement via girls' beliefs about who is good at math. First-and secondgrade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The math achievement of the students in these teachers' classrooms was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher's math anxiety and her students' math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year's end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that "boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading" and the lower these girls' math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers' math anxiety carries consequences for girls' math achievement by influencing girls' beliefs about who is good at math. education | mathematics | gender | stereotype | modeling A t most US colleges and universities, the mathematics requirements for students majoring in elementary education are minimal (1). As a result, students can successfully pursue a career as an elementary school teacher even if they have a propensity to avoid math. Interestingly, elementary education majors are largely female and have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major (2). Math anxiety manifests itself as an unpleasant emotional response to math or the prospect of doing math and is more common in women than in men (2). Because of these negative reactions, people high in math anxiety tend to stay away from math courses and math-related career paths † (3-5). Not only do math-anxious people avoid math but they also perform more poorly than their abilities would suggest when they are exposed to math. This is because math anxiety is not simply a proxy for poor math ability. Rather, the fears that math-anxious individuals experience when they are called on to do mathwhether it is working through a problem at the chalk board as an entire class looks on, taking a math test, or even calculating a restaurant bill-prevent them from using the math knowledge they possess to show what they know (3). When worries and selfdoubt occur, thinking and reasoning can be compromised (6).Math anxiety has been recognized as an impediment to math achievement (7). Yet, fears and anxiety about math may have more widespread consequences than merely having an impact on the achievement of math-anxious individuals themselves. If people wh...

Girls tend to have more negative math attitudes, including gender stereotypes, anxieties, and self-concepts, than boys. These attitudes play a critical role in math performance, math course-taking, and the pursuit of mathrelated career paths. We review existing research, primarily from U.S. samples, showing that parents' and teachers' expectancies for children's math competence are often gender-biased and can influence children's math attitudes and performance. We then propose three new directions for future research on the social transmission of gender-related math attitudes. First, parents' and teachers' own math anxieties and their beliefs about whether math ability is a stable trait may prove to be significant influences on children's math attitudes. Second, a developmental perspective that investigates math attitudes at younger ages and in relation to other aspects of gender development, such as gender rigidity, may yield new insights into the development of math attitudes. Third, investigating the specific behaviors and mannerisms that form the causal links between parents' and teachers' beliefs and children's math attitudes may lead to effective interventions to improve children's math attitudes from a young age. Such work will not only further our understanding of the relations between attitudes and performance, but will lead to the development of practical interventions for the home and classroom that ensure that all students are provided with opportunities to excel in math.

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Spatial skill is highly related to success in math and science (e.g., Casey, Nuttall, Pezaris, & Benbow, 1995). However, little work has investigated the cognitive pathways by which the relation between spatial skill and math achievement emerges. We hypothesized that spatial skill plays a crucial role in the development of numerical reasoning by helping children to create a spatially meaningful, powerful numerical representation-the linear number line. In turn, a strong linear number representation improves other aspects of numerical knowledge such as arithmetic estimation. We tested this hypothesis using 2 longitudinal data sets. First, we found that children's spatial skill (i.e., mental transformation ability) at the beginning of 1st and 2nd grades predicted improvement in linear number line knowledge over the course of the school year. Second, we found that children's spatial skill at age 5 years predicted their performance on an approximate symbolic calculation task at age 8 and that this relation was mediated by children's linear number line knowledge at age 6. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that spatial skill can improve children's development of numerical knowledge by helping them to acquire a linear spatial representation of numbers.

Two laboratory and two randomized field experiments tested a psychological intervention designed to improve students' scores on high-stakes exams and to increase our understanding of why pressure-filled exam situations undermine some students' performance. We expected that sitting for an important exam leads to worries about the situation and its consequences that undermine test performance. We tested whether having students write down their thoughts about an upcoming test could improve test performance. The intervention, a brief expressive writing assignment that occurred immediately before taking an important test, significantly improved students' exam scores, especially for students habitually anxious about test taking. Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores. F or many students, the desire to perform their best in academics is strong. Consequences for poor performance, especially on exams, include poor evaluations by mentors, teachers, and peers; lost scholarships; and relinquished educational opportunities. Yet despite the fact that students are often motivated to perform their best, the pressure-filled situations in which important tests occur can cause students to perform below their ability instead (1).The expression "choking under pressure" is used to describe what happens when people perform more poorly than expected given their skill level when there are large incentives for optimal performance and negative consequences for poor performance (2). Choking is a serious problem given that poor exam performance affects students' subsequent academic opportunities. It also limits potentially qualified students from participating in the talent pool tapped to fill advanced jobs in disciplines where the workforce is dwindling [e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce in the United States (3)]. Here we demonstrate how a 10-min. pre-exam intervention, derived from psychological theories of stress and performance, can prevent choking and enhance exam scores, particularly for students who habitually become anxious in testing situations.Several studies have shown that, when students feel an anxious desire to perform at a high level [i.e., performance pressure (4)], they worry about the situation and its consequences (5, 6). These worries compete for the working memory (WM) available for performance. WM is a shortterm memory system involved in the control and regulation of a limited amount of information immediately relevant to the task at hand (7). If the ability of WM to maintain task focus is disrupted because of situation-related worries, performance can suffer (8).Worries not only occur in intense academic situations but are a major component of depression and other clinical disorders (9). Expressive writing, in which people repeatedly write about a traumatic or emotional experience over several weeks or months, has been shown to be an effective technique for decreasing rumination in depressed individuals (10). Writing may alleviate the burden t...

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A large field study of children in first and second grade explored how parents' anxiety about math relates to their children's math achievement. The goal of the study was to better understand why some students perform worse in math than others. We tested whether parents' math anxiety predicts their children's math achievement across the school year. We found that when parents are more math anxious, their children learn significantly less math over the school year and have more math anxiety by the school year's end-but only if math-anxious parents report providing frequent help with math homework. Notably, when parents reported helping with math homework less often, children's math achievement and attitudes were not related to parents' math anxiety. Parents' math anxiety did not predict children's reading achievement, which suggests that the effects of parents' math anxiety are specific to children's math achievement. These findings provide evidence of a mechanism for intergenerational transmission of low math achievement and high math anxiety.

Even at young ages, children self-report experiencing math anxiety, which negatively relates to their math achievement. Leveraging a large dataset of first and second grade students' math achievement scores, math problem solving strategies, and math attitudes, we explored the possibility that children's math anxiety (i.e., a fear or apprehension about math) negatively relates to their use of more advanced problem solving strategies, which in turn relates to their math achievement. Our results confirm our hypothesis and, moreover, demonstrate that the relation between math anxiety and math problem solving strategies is strongest in children with the highest working memory capacity. Ironically, children who have the highest cognitive capacity avoid using advanced problem solving strategies when they are high in math anxiety and, as a result, underperform in math compared with their lower working memory peers.