Stereotype Threat

A recent study done by researchers at the University of Chicago has found that female elementary school teachers who have math anxiety seem to transfer that anxiety to their female students, negatively affecting those students’ performance in math. According to an interview with the lead author on the study by ScienceDaily:

“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 Sian Beilock, Associate Professor in Psychology and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago, lead author of a paper, “Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Affects Girls’ Math Achievement” published in the January 11 issue of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Beilock is an expert on anxiety and stress as they relate to learning and performance.

When one considers that 90% of all elementary school teachers are female and that those teachers are given very little math training, it is easy to see how this negative effect could be having huge consequences for American girls. This effect was further discussed in ScienceDaily’s interview with the lead author of the study, Sian Beilock:

Other research has shown that elementary school children are highly influenced by the attitudes of adults and that this relationship is strongest for students and adults of the same gender. “Thus it may be that first- and second-grade girls are more likely to be influenced by their teachers’ anxieties than their male classmates, because most early elementary school teachers are female and the high levels of math anxiety in this teacher population confirm a societal stereotype about girls’ math ability,” Beilock said.

In addition, the study showed that simply believing the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls has a dramatic and negative impact upon performance. Specifically, the study found that girls who believed this stereotype did markedly worse in math achievement than girls who did not. Boys’ performance was not affected.

In addition to this study, previous research done by Dr. Matthew McGlone at the University of Texas at Austin had found that standardized test scores were influenced by gender identity questions asked immediately prior to the exam. Dr. McGlone discussed his findings in a UT interview, an excerpt of which is found here:

Survey researchers have known for years that identity issues influence the way people answer opinion questions, especially in the context of political research. Women respond differently in political opinion surveys depending on the gender of the survey administrator, with a tendency to report more liberal attitudes when asked by a woman.

“What’s surprising is that identity issues can come into play into what is ostensibly a test of your knowledge,” said McGlone. “Heightened awareness about your identity as a man or woman or member of a certain group could influence your performance on a standardized math test.”

This phenomenon is called stereotype threat—the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which that person identifies, leading to impaired performance. It was first articulated by Aronson and social psychologist Claude Steele of Stanford University.

“Stereotype threat can be induced by a variety of subtle cues in the testing environment,” McGlone said, “such as the gender composition of a class or being asked to indicate one’s ethnicity or gender on a test demographics question. These cues heightened awareness of people’s ‘ascribed identities’—for example, identities based on things about themselves that they can’t easily change.”

McGlone acknowledged that many aspects of personal identity are achieved—membership in social categories based on individual achievements—rather than ascribed. He contended that deficits in test performance caused by stereotype threat could be mitigated by reminding test takers of the achieved identities they possess for which there are positive performance expectations.

“In other words, by putting women in a situation where they’re not preoccupied with negative gender stereotypes, you can significantly reduce the gender gap in standardized testing performance,” he said.

“These results suggest that priming a positive achieved identity (selective private college student) can alleviate women’s anxiety about confirming the negative stereotype that ‘women can’t do math,’” said McGlone. “When we primed this positive identity in men—for whom there is no negative stereotype regarding their math acumen—their performance was no better than when their gender was primed.

McGlone tested his hypothesis by priming different social identities among undergraduates prior to administering the Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test (VMRT), a standardized spatial reasoning test linked to math performance. The VMRT typically produces the largest documented gender difference in any cognitive ability, a difference some academics have attributed to genetic differences in intelligence favoring men.

McGlone and his colleagues asked male and female students at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., to take the VMRT. Prior to the test, the participants completed one of three short questionnaires composed of six questions designed to cue a particular social identity: their residence in the northeastern U.S., their gender, or their status as students in a selective private college.

He found that women who were primed to contemplate their identity as students at a selective private college performed at a significantly higher level on the VMRT than those primed to contemplate their gender or a test-irrelevant identity. In contrast, priming selective private college status among the male participants did not improve their performance. However, priming their gender status (men are better at math) did improve their performance.

Applications for these findings might include eliminating subtle cues from standardized math testing environments that might make gender identity issues salient to women and impair their performance.

“We’re pushing for the College Board and other standardized testing organizations to move demographic questions to the end of the test,” said McGlone. “Testers think they’re just collecting data in asking for gender, ethnic and geographic information, but there’s a subtle—and consequential—communication going on here. It says, ‘Your gender matters.”‘

“By simply manipulating when questions are asked we can appreciably improve SAT scores,” he said. “Ideally, cues that heighten awareness of any negative stereotypes—ascribed or not—should be eliminated from testing environments.”

Photo Source: HeraldTribune

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