Very interesting and reasonably short paper. The basic situation:
- “[E]lementary education majors are largely female and have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major.”
- “By the school year’s end … the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that ‘boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading’ and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall.”
Of course, this is only one piece of a very large puzzle, but it confirms something I’ve suspected for years.
