Parenting: Why little girls may learn to fear math

January 25, 2010 - Studies show that little girls may be learning to fear math from their earliest teachers who are anxious about their own math skills.

Girls in their classes are more likely to believe that boys are better than girls at math.

And at the end of the school year, girls in the classrooms of math-anxious teachers had lower achievement in math than boys.

"The more anxious a teacher was, the more likely a girl was to believe boys are good at math and girls are good at reading, and the more likely she was to perform worse at math relative to boys and to girls who don't endorse the stereotype," said study author Sian Beilock, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

While women have made many advances over the years, they still trail men when it comes to math. A study of first and second-grade teachers suggests that elementary school teachers who are concerned with their own math skills could be passing that concern along to the little girls they teach.

Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago, said students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex. Having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better than girls in math.

Beilock and colleagues studied 52 boys and 65 girls who were in classes taught by 17 different teachers. Ninety percent of U.S. elementary school teachers are women as was the case with teachers who participated in the study.

The researchers study is in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Results of the test also showed that girls who answered “boys are better at math than girls” scored lower on math types than either the classes’ boys or girls who had not developed a belief in the stereotype.

"It's actually surprising in a way, and not. People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn't know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion," Beilock said in a telephone interview.

Other research has indicated elementary education majors at the college level have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major.

Increasing math requirements for elementary education programs could help alleviate math anxiety in elementary school teachers, thereby influencing girls' math achievement, according to the researchers.

"If the next generation of teachers - especially elementary school teachers - is going to teach their students effectively, more care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators," the researchers wrote.

Sources:
The Seattle Times
USA Today

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