共用题干 Teaching Math,Teaching Anxiety
In a new study about the way kids learn math in elementary school,the psychologists at the University of Chicago Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found a surprising relationship be-tween what female teachers think and what female students learn:If a female teacher is un-comfortable with her own math skills,then her female students are more likely to believe that boys are better than girls at math.
If these girls keep getting math-anxious female teachers in later grades,it may create a snowball effect on their math achievement said Levine. In other words,girls may end up learning math anxiety from their teachers. The study suggests that if these girls grow up be-lieving that boys are better at math than girls are,then these girls may not do as well as they would have if they were more confident.
Just as students find certain subjects to be difficult,teachers can find certain subjects to be difficult to learn一and teach. The subject of math can be particularly difficult for every-one. Researchers use the word“anxiety”to describe such feelings:anxiety is uneasiness or worry.
The new study found that when a teacher has anxiety about math,that feeling can influ-
ence how her female students feel about math. The study involved 65 girls,52 boys and 17 first-and second-grade teachers in elementary schools in the Midwest. The students took math achievement tests at the beginning and end of the school year,and the researchers com-pared the scores.
The researchers also gave the students tests to tell whether the students believed that a math superstar had to be a boy. Then the researchers turned to the teachers:To find out
which teachers were anxious about math,the researchers asked the teachers how they felt at times when they came across math,such as when reading a sales receipt. A teacher who got nervous looking at the numbers on a sales receipt,for example, was probably anxious about math.
Boys,on average,were unaffected by a teacher"s anxiety. On average,girls with math-anxious teachers scored lower on the end-of-the-year math tests than other girls in the study
did. Plus,on the test showing whether someone thought a math superstar had to be a boy,20 girls showed feeling that boys would be better at math一and all of these girls had been taught by female teachers who had math anxiety.
“This is an interesting study,but the results need to be interpreted as preliminary and in need of replication with a larger sample,”said David Geary,a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. What is the result of the research at the University of Chicago,according to the firstparagraph?