Math: Dread of female teachers becomes Fear for female students

William Atkins
Tuesday, 26 January 2010 18:28

Science - Biology

According to a U.S. study, early elementary female teachers, who are anxious and fearful about teaching mathematics to their students, were found to pass on that dread to their female students—but not to their male students.


The article “Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement” summarizes the results of the work peformed by U.S. researchers Sian L. Beilock, Elizabeth A. Gunderson, Gerardo Ramirez, and Susan C. Levine, all from the Department of Psychology and Committee on Education, University of Chicago, in Illinois.

It appears in the January 25, 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS article: doi: 10.1073/pnas.0910967107).

The researchers studied 17 first and second grade teachers (12 first grade teachers and 5 second grade teachers) and their students from a large Midwestern urban school district.

Of the students, 52 were boys and 65 were girls. Of the teachers, they had an average of 13 years of experience teaching early elementary students.

Over 90% of elementary teachers in the United States are women (with 91% in elementary grades, and an even higher percentage in early elementary grades).

Because females have been shown to be traditionally “math-anxious”—which negatively affects one’s ability to perform mathematics—the researchers wanted to find out if such anxiety is passed on from teacher to student.

Specifically, they had three hypotheses to test.

Page two discusses these three hypotheses.