|
Teaching Math,Teaching Anxiety In a new study about the way kids learn math in elementary school,the psychologists at the University of Chicagol1 Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found a surprising relationship between what female teachers think and what female students learn:If a female teacher is uncomfortable with her own math skills,then her female students are more likely to believe that boys are better than girls at math. Just as students find certain subjects to be difficult, teachers can find certain subjects to be difficult to learn -- and teach. The subject of math can be particularly difficult for everyone. Researchers use the word anxiety to describe such feelings:anxiety is uneasiness or worry. 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 receipt5. A teacher who got nervous looking at the numbers on a sales receipt, for example,was probably anxious about math. This is an interesting study,but the results need to be interpreted as preliminary and in need of replication with a larger sample6, said David Geary,a psychologist at the University of Missouri7 in Columbia. snowball 雪球;滚雪球式增长的事 | 
