Elementary school teachers' math anxiety and students' math learning: A large‐scale replication

Abstract

Children's early math knowledge is critical to their later academic achievement, not only in math but also more broadly (Duncan et al., 2007). In attempts to understand how to effectively support children's math achievement, researchers often focus on the math content that children encounter and the quality of their instruction.However, teachers' attitudes about math (e.g., teachers' expectations for their students' success) might also influence children's math achievement (Gershenson et al., 2016;Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).In this paper, we explore whether one attitude in particular, teachers' math anxiety, is associated with worse student math learning in elementary school, and whether the association between teachers' math anxiety and students' math learning varies by student gender.Math anxiety is characterized by feelings of fear and apprehen-

Controlling-Supportive Homework Help Partially Explains the Relation between Parents’ Math Anxiety and Children’s Math Achievement

“…Not only does one's math anxiety relate to their own achievement in math, but the math anxiety of a mentor can negatively impact the math achievement and math anxiety of their mentees. In the context of the school environment, negative relations have been found between early elementary teachers' math anxiety and their students' math achievement such that when teachers are higher in math anxiety, their students learn less math [5][6][7]. While many interventions and policies aimed at improving math education focus on classroom and school-level factors [8], they often overlook the crucial role that parents play in their child's math education [9].…”

Factors Explaining Business Student Attitudes Towards Mathematics: Does Gender Still Matter?

“…Many factors influence students' attitudes towards mathematics including the teacher's view of the use of mathematics (Marbán & Mulenga, 2019;Schaeffer et al, 2020). Our investigation of this topic will include mathematical skills and personality traits using the Big Five Model.…”

Disentangling the individual and contextual effects of math anxiety: A global perspective

“…Individual factors include genetics (21), working memory capacity (17), attentional bias (22), and affective or physiological responses (23). Interpersonal factors include parental support and expectations (9), parental attitudes toward mathematics (24), teacher's own math anxiety (25,26), teacher self-efficacy (27), and teacher expectations of students (28). Environmental factors include math activities at home (29), classroom atmosphere (30), and cultural background (31).…”

“…Second, perhaps as a consequence of information silos in the extant literature, the multilevel nature of math anxiety has been scarcely explored. Particularly, hints of the multilevel nature of math anxiety can be found from studies that showed that multiple interpersonal and environmental predictors of math anxiety (e.g., teacher's own math anxiety) (25,26) exist at a higher, clustered level (i.e., these factors affect a group of individuals who shared the same education environment rather than specific individuals). This suggests there may be systematic variations of math anxiety at the education environment level, and student membership in any particular education environment would be predictive of student math anxiety to some degree (Methods has reasons why we elected to use the broader term education environment to refer to influences from the school or classroom).…”