Girls can't count on the teachers
Source: Agencies |
January 27, 2010, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
LITTLE girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.
Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in the United States in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests part of the answer: Female school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the girls they teach.
Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.
Beilock and colleagues studied 52 boys and 65 girls who were in classes taught by 17 different teachers. Ninety percent of US elementary school teachers are women, as were all of those in this study.
Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students °?- but not the boys - were to agree that "boys are good at math and girls are good at reading."
In addition, the girls who answered that way scored lower on math tests than either the boys or the girls who had not developed a belief in the stereotype, the researchers found.
"It's actually surprising in a way, and not. 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," Beilock said.
The researchers recommend that math requirements should be rethought for students seeking a teaching degree, with care given to strengthen their skills.
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