Female school teachers anxious about maths pass that fear onto the girls in their classes, according to a University of Chicago study published this week in PNAS.
The researchers assessed maths achievement in the beginning of the school year, and after students were exposed to their teachers’ unease for months. The higher the teachers’ anxiety level, the lower the achievement of the girls — but not the boys. The study also says that teachers accomplished this by possibly enforcing stereotypes that boys are better at maths.
“It’s actually surprising in a way, and not,” lead author Sian Beilock told the AP. “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.”
Despite caveats — e.g. “the effects reported in the current work, although significant, are small”—the study suggests teachers are undermining their students’ confidence, and gender is a reason.
Their data come from 17 urban, Midwestern women and the 52 boys and 65 girls they teach in the first- and second-grade. Teachers’ anxieties were evaluated using questions about how anxious different situations make them feel (e.g. “reading a cash register receipt after you buy something”). To measure gender biases at the beginning and end of the year, the researchers asked students to draw who they thought would be good at reading and who would be good at math. By the end of the year, “girls who pick up on that negative typecasting score lower on a math achievement test, on average, than girls who don’t” Science News writes.
But the team never measured male teachers’ anxieties and subsequent effects because they say over 90 percent of early elementary school teachers are females. Would a maths-anxious male teacher pass that on to boys and not girls? A hard question to answer, the researchers confess. Children “model behaviors they believe to be gender typical and appropriate,” the study says, concluding that teachers of either sex are responsible for many of the traits that characterize children.
The authors also admit “there are likely many influences on girls’ math achievement and gender ability beliefs” and perhaps girls are more observant and likely to pick up on their teachers’ negativities.