Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Impacts Girls’ Math Achievement

• In Event: Gender and Mathematics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium Examining Classroom Influences, Achievement, and Affect

Abstract

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math – over and above their actual math ability – can be an impediment to their math achievement. This fear, often termed “math anxiety” is more common in women than in men and leads people to avoid math-related courses and career paths.

In the current study, we investigated whether math anxiety can have more widespread consequences than merely impacting the academic paths and achievement of math anxious individuals themselves. Specifically we asked whether when people who are anxious about math are charged with teaching others mathematics, if teachers’ anxieties could have consequences for their students’ math achievement.

We focused on early elementary school teachers in order to explore how teachers might impact their students at the start of formal schooling. Moreover, because early elementary school teachers in the U.S. are almost exclusively female (> 90%), we focused on female teachers. Given that children do not blindly imitate adults of the same gender, but instead tend to model behaviors they believe to be gender-typical and appropriate, we were particularly interested in whether female teachers’ math anxieties might relate more strongly to girls’ as compared to boys’ math achievement.

1st and 2nd grade female teachers (N=17) completed measures of math anxiety. The math achievement of the boys and girls (N=117) 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 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 or belief 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.

At most U.S. colleges and universities, the mathematics requirements for students majoring in elementary education are minimal. 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. We show that female teachers’ math anxiety carries consequences for girls’ math achievement by influencing girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.

Authors

• Sian Leah Beilock, University of Chicago

• Elizabeth A. Gunderson, University of Chicago

• Gerardo Ramirez, University of Chicago

• Susan C. Levine, University of Chicago