Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers

Psychologists are suggesting that young girls may learn to fear math from their earliest female teachers. The U.S. study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that over the course of a school year, the more anxious teachers are about their own math skills, the more likely their female students were to agree that, "boys are good at math and girls are good at reading." Ninety per cent of U.S. elementary school teachers are female, as were all the teachers in the study. "If the next generation of teachers is going to teach their students effectively, more care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators," the researchers wrote.

CBC News