Female teachers transmit math anxiety to female students | Hacker News Reader

Female teachers transmit math anxiety to female students

arstechnica.com

24 pointsfogus19 comments

> Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping

This seems to be taking one (politically motivated) assumption and making it into an uncontested piece of background information.

There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math.

Perhaps some girls have math anxiety in the same way that some (male) nerds have anxiety about meeting new people: they KNOW that the task is difficult for them, and they don't want to fail.

> The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students.

Of course, if female teachers are less skilled at math, then that would also explain the findings.

>There's a fair bit of good data that suggests that women are, on average, not as good as men at math.

Care to share some of that data? The research I've seen suggests that those differences essentially disappear when girls are taught separately from boys.

I haven't seen any studies about general men and woman, the only study I've seen is that men seem to have a wider distribution than women -- this was offered to explain why men seem to dominate certain fields. This is not saying that men in general are better at math, just that the underlying probability distributions are different and it might not be reasonable to expect a 50/50 split at the top of a given field. The underlying distribution might 60/40 or 70/30. Just as the prison populations, and serial killer rates are different.

Sounds to me like there's a vicious cycle going on. Girls are socialized to think that math is hard, have difficulty acquiring the skills, grow up, become teachers, and pass both their skill and attitudes on to the next generation of girls. This makes it rather difficult to find the ground truth (if any) on whether girls are inherently worse or better at math.

I'd also like to see the data you refer to. Anecdotally, my pre-cal and calculus classes in high school had more girls than boys.

A teacher, male or female, who is anxious about math should not be teaching math.

Teachers should be confident in the knowledge of what they teach. Otherwise they are doing it wrong.

The problem with this notion is that elementary school teachers need to be generalists; subjects don't really start getting "split" subjectively (with different teachers) until middle and high school.

[Edit] Citation FTA: A new study suggests that elementary school may be a breeding ground for this anxiety. The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students.

It still holds: an adult who lacks confidence in his/her ability to do +-*/ on multi-digit numbers and fractions should not be teaching the subject to elementary-school-aged kids.

I think the sad truth is just that there's a substantial shortage of competent elementary school teachers in the supply pool.

Yes, they struggle even with such simple arithmetic tasks (speaking from my experience at public schools).

Pay them more, and offer a promotion path, and you will get better candidates.

That may help. Offering more prestiges may be cheaper.

The Economist had a piece (sourced by studies by some consultancies) that investigated the most important factors that determine the success of education systems around the world.

Attracting good teachers was among the most important factor. But as far as I remember high pay did not work as well as high prestige. (South Korea seemed to have a knack for conferring high prestige on their elementary school teachers. They have strict entry requirements for studying to become a teacher --- and usually only take in as many students as they forecast to need as teachers in a few years.)

[Everything written from memory. If somebody can find the article (or other sources), please post it here. Thanks!]

subjects don't really start getting "split" subjectively (with different teachers) until middle and high school.

That's a mistake of the system in the United States. In many other countries, teachers specialize by subject in the elementary grades, the better to teach their subject effectively. See Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

for a detailed discussion of elementary math teaching, or The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

for a broader perspective on other ways to organize schools.

> Girls often believe themselves to be bad at math, in accordance with gender stereotyping

I think this should be qualified with "in the US". I don't think I had a single male math teacher when I went to school in Russia. In fact, girls were supposed to be more studious and get better grades in all subjects. And yet, undergraduates in the technical courses were predominantly male, while humanities students (including students of pedagogy -- future teachers) were mostly female.

In the US, you will be accused of being sexist if you say that there are any differences between girls and boys that aren't due to "gender stereotyping".

I don't understand something here. If the teacher is female why should it not rub off on the boys in the same way, after all she's primarily a teacher. Or does a female teacher that has math-anxiety automatically project the opposite to the other gender ?

If that's the case then you should put males with math-anxiety in front of female students and vice versa.

The version of the article I read (not this one) mentioned in passing that children tend to take same-gendered role models, and that 90% of elementary-school teachers are female. The inference is that females have negative role models for math, while males have none, which is apparently better.

It is referenced in this version: The researchers speculate that the influence of female teachers on their students results from the tendency of children to emulate adults of the same gender.

But for the study to be meaningful you'd have to study the opposite cases as well, and that makes for four combinations in total.

And they've studied only one.

I haven't seen the actual article of this study, but I assumed they referenced previous studies of this effect. That is, I assume it's an established phenomenon, not something they are surmising from their results.

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