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I am currently doing a research study (funded by @IESResearch) about the relation between teachers' math anxiety and student math outcomes. Why? Because we actually don't really know if teachers' math anxiety DOES matter for students. There are 3 studies so far... https://twitter.com/DTWillingham/status/1197471781524627458
Study 1: Beilock et al. (2010) studied 17 grade 1 or 2 teachers and 117 of their students. They found a relation between teacher math anxiety and end-of-year student math achievement (controlling for start-of-year achievement) for girls but not for boys. https://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1860.short
Study 2: Hadley & Dorward (2011) studied 692 1-6 grade teachers and found teachers' own math anxiety didn't relate to their class average math scores, but their anxiety about teaching math had a small significant negative relation with scores (r=-.09).
http://www.joci.ecu.edu/index.php/JoCI/article/view/65/pdf
http://www.joci.ecu.edu/index.php/JoCI/article/view/65/pdf
Study 3: Ramirez et al. (2018) with 60 grade 9 math teachers and their ~1300 students found that teachers' math anxiety was related to lower math GPAs of their students (controlling for students' past math performance). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858418756052
So, we've got a little bit of evidence that teacher math anxiety is bad for student math achievement, but really not that much. Definitely not enough to warrant the article title: "Math scares your child’s elementary school teacher - and that should frighten you."
That said, obviously it makes sense to keep trying to understand teachers' math anxiety! It can't be fun to go to work and have to do something that makes you anxious. We should want to address this as an issue of teacher well-being even if doesn't matter for student learning.
I also don't want to imply that I necessarily agree or disagree with the suggestions in the opinion piece, but I just want to clarify the research base that is being drawn on as part of the argument.
And there is one more thing I want to point out related to the research...
And there is one more thing I want to point out related to the research...
The title and article imply that many elementary teachers have math anxiety, and that's not completely true. We find lots of variability and that the distribution is positively skewed, suggesting most elementary teachers don't have "high" math anxiety (mean=2.28 on 1-5 scale).
Obviously some still do...and we should work with those teachers. But, it is not the case that most or all teachers have "high" math anxiety. (High in quotes because it's somewhat subjective.)
Anyway, stay tuned to see what we find in our study!! We are entering the data now!
Anyway, stay tuned to see what we find in our study!! We are entering the data now!
Also, the histogram is with the data from this paper if you are interested in any of our other findings: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2332858419839702
Also, I just realized I totally gave myself 100% credit for the IES grant that is in collaboration with lots of fabulous people!! cc: @schoenresearch @schotz @cbg131 @GeerPsych @RachelAConlon @CharityBauduin1
The link to Hadley & Dorward (2011) is wrong, this is the correct one!:
http://www.joci.ecu.edu/index.php/JoCI/article/viewFile/100/pdf
http://www.joci.ecu.edu/index.php/JoCI/article/viewFile/100/pdf
