Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Impacts Girls’ Math Achievement

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 U.S. are almost exclusively female (> 90%) and we provide the first evidence that these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math. 1 and 2 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 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. 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. \body TEACHERS’ MATH ANXIETY Achievement 3 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. Math anxiety manifests itself as an unpleasant emotional response to math or the prospect of doing math and is more common in women than in men. Because of these negative reactions, people high in math anxiety tend to stay away from math courses and math-related career paths. Not only do math anxious people avoid math, they also perform more poorly than their abilities would suggest when they are exposed to math. This is because math anxiety is not simply a proxy for poor math ability. Rather, the fears that math anxious individuals experience when they are called upon to do math – whether it is working through a problem at the chalk board as an entire class looks on, taking a math test, or even calculating a restaurant bill – prevent them from using the math knowledge they possess to show what they know. When worries and self-doubt occur, thinking and reasoning can be compromised. Math anxiety has been recognized as an impediment to math achievement. Yet, fears and anxiety about math may have more widespread consequences than merely impacting the achievement of math anxious individuals themselves. If people who are anxious about math are charged with teaching others mathematics – as is often the case for elementary school teachers – teachers’ anxieties could have consequences for their students’ math achievement. Even more striking is that any relation that may exist between teacher anxiety and student achievement might not be uniform across all students and their teachers. Children are more likely TEACHERS’ MATH ANXIETY Achievement 4 to emulate the behavior and attitudes of same-gender versus opposite gender adults. Because early elementary school teachers in the U.S. are almost exclusively female (> 90%), and gender is a highly salient feature to children at the early elementary school age, girls may be more likely than boys to notice their teacher’s negativities and fears about math. This, in turn, may negatively impact girls’ math achievement. The research reported here assessed the math anxiety of seventeen 1 and 2 grade female teachers from a large Midwestern urban school district. The math achievement of the students (52 boys; 65 girls) in these teachers’ classrooms, along with students’ beliefs about gender and academic success in domains like math, was also assessed. Our first hypothesis was that the more math anxiety a female teacher had, the lower her students’ math achievement. Our second hypothesis was that this relation would only hold for girls. Finally, our third hypothesis was that any relation between female teachers’ math anxiety and girls’ math achievement that did exist could be accounted for by whether girls in these teachers’ classrooms believed in traditional academic gender stereotypes (i.e., boys are good at math while girls are good at reading). To test these hypotheses, we assessed students’ math achievement in the first three months of the school year and again in the last two months of the year. We predicted that if female teachers are influencing their students, a relation between teacher anxiety and student achievement should be evident at the end of the school year, but not at the beginning of the year when children’s classroom exposure to their teachers is minimal. To test our third hypothesis regarding how female teachers’ anxieties might affect girls math achievement, we asked students to perform a task that gauged the extent to which they adhered to traditional gender stereotypes TEACHERS’ MATH ANXIETY Achievement 5 that boys are good at math and girls are good at reading. At both the beginning and end of the school year, students were told two gender-neutral stories, one about a student who was good at math and one about a student who was good at reading, and were asked to draw these students. We were interested in the genders of the drawings that children produced for each story. From these drawings, we formed a measure of students’ gender ability beliefs by assigning drawings of boys a 1 and drawings of girls a 0 and subtracting the reading from the math drawing score [math drawing – reading drawing]. The higher the score, the more children ascribed to traditional (or stereotypic) gender roles in school.