The new study found that when a teacher has anxiety about math, that feeling can influence how her female students feel about math. The study involved 65 girls,52 boys and 17 first- and second-grade teachers in elementary schools in the Midwest. The students took math achievement tests at the beginning and end of the school year, and the researchers compared the scores.
The researchers also gave the students tests to tell whether the students believed that a math superstar had to be a boy. Then the researchers turned to the teachers:To find out which teachers were anxious about math,the researchers asked the teachers how they felt at times when they came across math, such as when reading a sales receipt. A teacher who got nervous looking at the numbers on a sales receipt, for example,was probably anxious about math.
Boys,on average,were unaffected by a teacher’s anxiety. On average,girls with math-anxious teachers scored lower on the end-of-the-year math tests than other girls in the study did.Plus,on the test showing whether someone thought a math superstar had to be a boy,20 girls showed feeling that boys would be better at math -- and all of these girls had been taught by female teachers who had math anxiety.