How Teachers' Math Anxiety Gets Passed to Girls

Editor's note: the original version of this post was a truncated press release. It has been rewritten as an original summary of the published research.

Female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math can pass that anxiety — and the stereotype behind it — to their female students, who then do worse at math. That was the finding of a year-long study by Sian Beilock and colleagues at the University of Chicago, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study followed 17 first- and second-grade teachers and their students — 52 boys and 65 girls. The researchers measured the teachers' math anxiety and tracked the children's math achievement and their beliefs about gender and math over the school year.

The pattern was striking and specific. Boys' math performance had no relationship to their teacher's math anxiety. But girls taught by highly math-anxious female teachers were more likely to endorse the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls — and those girls performed worse on math tests. The mechanism, the researchers argued, is stereotype confirmation: the teacher's visible discomfort teaches girls that the stereotype applies to them, and the belief then drags down performance.

"Having a highly math-anxious female teacher may push girls to confirm the stereotype that they are not as good as boys at math, which in turn affects girls' math achievement," said Beilock, then an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

The study doesn't blame teachers — math anxiety is common, and elementary teaching programs have historically done little to address it. But it does identify a concrete, fixable lever: helping teachers become comfortable with math isn't just professional development, it's an intervention in the next generation's beliefs about who gets to be good at it.