Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement

Abstract

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...

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