Pre-service Elementary School Teachers’ Expectations about Student Performance: How their Beliefs are affected by their Mathematics Anxiety and Student’s Gender

Abstract

Using a survey-experiment methodology we evaluate whether elementary school pre-service teachers’ beliefs about students’ future mathematics achievement, and general academic achievement, are influenced by teachers’ mathematics anxiety level, or by gender and socioeconomic status of the student. We found that mathematics anxiety can negatively influence pre-service elementary school teachers’ expectations about students, and that participants assign lower expectations of future mathematics achievement to girls than boys. The two effects, however, appear to be strictly independent as we did not find statistically significant interaction effects between pre-service teacher’s mathematics anxiety and the biases associated with student’s gender.

Posted on Jul 14, 2014 in Education, Seminars