Female Mentors Prevent Math Anxiety
Girls may learn math anxiety from female elementary school teachers, according to a new study. Introducing math specialists or female role models who are confident of their math abilities could eliminate this problem.
Nationwide, girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests, according to extensive research by the National Science Foundation. Yet, math anxiety is much higher for girls, while boys are more confident about their math abilities.
According to a recent study by psychologist Sian Beilock, when a female teacher had higher math anxiety, girls’ level of math anxiety increased over the year – but boys’ levels remained the same. The increased anxiety also translated into poorer performance on standardized math tests.
Elementary education majors have more math anxiety than students in any other college major. Since more than 90 percent of elementary teachers are female, this means teachers may be passing their fear of math on to female students.
Beilock is an expert on stress and anxiety at the University of Chicago, whose study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, researchers assessed math anxiety in 17 female elementary school teachers, and followed their first- and second-grade students for one year. The study included 52 male students and 65 female ones.
The study also measured the students’ belief in gender stereotypes about reading and math, and math achievement. To assess gender stereotypes, students heard two stories – one about a student good in math, another about a student good at reading. Neither story identified the sex of the student in the story. When asked to draw the student from each story, many girls drew a male student who was good at math. The same girls scored lower on standardized math tests, by an average of 6 points.
The solution may be to provide math specialists or female math mentors and role models, according to Nicole Else-Quest of Villanova University. Her study analyzed data from almost 500,000 students between 14 and 16, in 69 countries.
She found that girls performed as well as boys on standardized math tests when they were exposed to female role models who were excellent in mathematics. Her study appeared in the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association.
By Joni Holderman, [email protected], contributing reporter for Mental Health News.