Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement

By Sian L. Beilock, Elizabeth A. Gunderson, Gerardo Ramirez, Susan C. Levine. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010

1,095 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 second-grade 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.

Subfields: Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6eefdda8d3476fa75d688129fa335eab0744b13

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Citations in the corpus

Math Anxiety: Past Research, Promising Interventions, and a New Interpretation Framework (2018, background): “Social interactions in class (“My teacher gets really stressed out teaching math”; Beilock et al., 2010).”
Women's Representation in Science Predicts National Gender-Science Stereotypes: Evidence from 66 Nations. (2015, background): “Such role models show promise for weakening stereotypes, especially among female students (Beilock et al., 2010; Galdi et al., 2014; although see Lenton, Bruder, & Sedikides, 2009) and students who strongly identify with the role models (Young et al., 2013).”
Pre-service elementary school teachers' expectations about student performance: How their beliefs are affected by their mathematics anxiety and student's gender (2015, background): “The high prevalence of mathematics anxiety among future teachers is also crucial considering that teachers might transmit their anxieties to their students (Beilock et al. 2010; Conrad & Tracy, 1992; Sloan et al. 2002; Vinson, 2001; Wood, 1998).”
Academic Performance and Single-Sex Schooling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Switzerland (2015, background): “But this effect has only been observed for primary school teachers (Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, and Levine, 2010); it is not likely that female high-school teachers who have studied mathematics at the university level are afflicted with this kind of anxiety.”
The Stereotypical Computer Scientist: Gendered Media Representations as a Barrier to Inclusion for Women (2013, background): “2012; Jacobs 1991), teachers (Beilock et al. 2010; Fennema et al. 1990), peers (Cheryan et al.”
Gender and competition in adolescence: task matters (2013, background): “One way to increase girls’ confidence in math is by increasing the confidence level in math of the female teachers (Beilock et al. 2010).”
Mathematics Anxiety in Young Children: An Exploratory Study (2013, background): “Thus, an alternative hypothesis is that mathematics anxiety can be triggered even after one year of mathematics instruction (Beilock et al., 2010).”
Mathematics Anxiety: What Have We Learned in 60 Years? (2016, background): “This increased anxiety may come from several sources, including exposure to gender stereotypes, and the influence and social transmission of anxiety by female teachers who are themselves anxious about mathematics (Beilock et al., 2010).”
The Development of Gender Achievement Gaps in Mathematics and Reading During Elementary and Middle School (2011, background): “Given Beilock et al.’s (2010) findings that mathematically anxious first- and second-grade female teachers adversely affect their female students’ gender stereotypes and math learning, it is possible that math anxiety among U.”