Believing
Stereotype Undermines Girls' Math Performance: Elementary School Women Teachers
Transfer Their Fear of Doing Math to Girls, Study Finds
Female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math pass on
to female students the stereotype that boys, not girls, are good at math. Girls
who endorse this belief then do worse at math, research at the University of
Chicago shows.
These findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first- and
second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students. The
researchers found that boys' math performance was not related to their
teacher's math anxiety while girls' math achievement was affected.
"Having a highly math-anxious female teacher may push girls to
confirm the stereotype that they are not as good as boys at math, which in
turn, affects girls' math achievement," said Sian Beilock, Associate
Professor in Psychology and the Committee on Education at the University of
Chicago, lead author of a paper.
More than 90 percent of elementary school teachers in the country are
women and they are able to get their teaching certificates with very little
mathematics preparation, according to the National Survey of Science and
Mathematics Education. Other research shows that elementary education majors
have the highest rate of mathematics anxiety of any college major.
The potential of these teachers to impact girls' performance by
transmitting their own anxiety about mathematics has important consequences.
Teachers' anxiety might undermine female students' confidence in learning
mathematics throughout their years of schooling and also decrease their
performance in other subjects, such as science and engineering, which are
dependent on mathematical understanding.
To determine the impact of teachers' mathematics anxiety on students,
the team assessed teachers' anxiety about math. Then, at both the beginning and
end of the school year, the research team also tested the students' level of
mathematics achievement and the gender stereotypes the students held.
To assess stereotypes, the students were told gender neutral stories
about students who were good at mathematics and good at reading and then asked
to draw a picture of a student who was good at mathematics and one that was
good at reading. Researchers were interested in examining the genders of the
drawings that children produced for each story.
At the beginning of the school year, student math achievement was
unrelated to teacher math anxiety in both boys and girls. By the end of the
school year, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more
likely girls, but not boys, were to endorse the view that "boys are good
at math and girls are good at reading." Girls who accepted this stereotype
did significantly worse on math achievement measures at the end of the school year
than girls who did not accept the stereotype and than boys overall.
Girls who confirmed a belief that boys are better in math than girls
scored six points lower in math achievement than did boys or girls who had not
developed a belief in the stereotype (102 for the girls who accepted the
stereotype, versus 108 for the other students).
Other research has shown that elementary school children are highly
influenced by the attitudes of adults and that this relationship is strongest
for students and adults of the same gender. "Thus it may be that first-
and second-grade girls are more likely to be influenced by their teachers'
anxieties than their male classmates, because most early elementary school
teachers are female and the high levels of math anxiety in this teacher
population confirm a societal stereotype about girls' math ability,"
Beilock said.
The authors suggest that elementary teacher preparation programs could
be strengthened by requiring more mathematics preparation for future teachers
as well as by addressing issues of math attitudes and anxiety in these
teachers.
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