Girls more likely to suffer from 'mathematics anxiety'

Submitted by Broadsword on Mon, 2012-07-09 22:13

Article here. Study here. Excerpt:

Research shows girls are more likely to suffer from “mathematics anxiety” – holding them back in tests.

It was suggested that maths was often viewed as a male subject, meaning many young women were socialised into thinking of themselves as “mathematically incompetent”.

Academics from Oxford and Cambridge universities said that girls and boys performed roughly the same in independently-set maths exams.
...

Children aged 11 to 15 were presented with a maths test and asked to complete a questionnaire used to assess their physiological, emotional, cognitive and behavioural reactions to answering the questions.

It revealed no difference between girls and boys in straight test results, but found that girls displayed higher levels of mathematical anxiety.

The study found that heightened levels of fear – in turn – affected girls’ performance in maths exams. Without this anxiety, girls were likely to pull ahead of boys in tests, it was revealed.'

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Comments

Most women hate math. They're not good at it. They don't enjoy it (one feeds into the other I'm sure). They're not really into abstract thinking in general. Of course we can keep making it more of a "girl math" which will mean we will continue to damage American education, economics, science, engineering, etc..

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Submitted by ActaNonVerba on Wed, 2012-07-11 11:42